Interference-aware cooperative QoS routing in multi-hop wireless networks

Cooperative communication is a new physical technology, which has the potential to improve QoS support for multi-hop wireless network. Existing works did not consider the interference effect among links while designing cooperative QoS routing. To overcome this limitation, this paper targets at designing an interference-aware Cooperative QoS routing algorithm (CQ-routing) to satisfy users' bandwidth requirement. We formulate the problem of finding cooperative routing path with maximum available bandwidth as an optimization problem, called Coop-routing problem. We prove that the Coop-routing problem is strong NP-hard. We propose both centralized and distributed algorithm to solve the Coop-routing problem. We prove that the centralized algorithm can achieve a constant approximation ratio. We evaluate the performance of these algorithms through simulations. The results show that CQ-routing algorithms can significantly improve the network performance in terms of available bandwidth and number of admitted flows. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.