A study of multi-hop cellular networks

The number of cellular communication subscribers continues to grow, attesting to the great success of this technology. However, cellular networks have inherent limitations on cell capacity and coverage and shortcomings such as the dead spot and the hot spot problems. Multi-hop cellular networks (MCNs) help enhance the cell capacity and coverage, while, at the same time, alleviating the dead spot and hot spot problems, increasing the utilization of radio resource, and reducing the power consumption of mobile terminals. In the past decade, more than a dozen of MCN architectures were proposed. In this paper, we study various types of MCN proposals. We identify and discuss the design decision factors and use these factors to classify most existing MCN proposals. Future research directions, including studies of capacity and energy consumption, and approaches addressing design issues such as cell size, routing, channel assignment, load balancing for MCNs are discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.