There are a lot of recent interests on cooperative communication (CC) in wireless networks. Despite the large capacity gain of CC in small wireless networks with its capability of mitigating fading taking advantage of spatial diversity, cooperative communication can result in severe interference in large networks and even degraded throughput. The aim of this work is to concurrently exploit multi-radio and multi-channel (MRMC) technique and cooperative transmission technique to combat co-channel interference and improve the performance of multi-hop wireless network. Our proposed solution concurrently considers cooperative routing, channel assignment, and relay selection and takes advantage of both MRMC technique and spatial diversity in cooperative wireless networks to improve the throughput. We propose two important metrics, contention-aware channel utilization routing metric (CACU) to capture the interference cost from both direct transmission and cooperative transmission, and traffic aware channel condition metric (TACC) to evaluate the channel load condition. Based on these metrics, we propose three algorithms for interference-aware cooperative routing, local channel adjustment, and local path and relay adaptation respectively to ensure high performance communications in dynamic wireless networks. Our algorithms are designed to be fully distributed and can effectively mitigate co-channel interference and achieve cooperative diversity gain. To our best knowledge, this is the first distributed solution that supports cooperative communications in MRMC networks. Our performance studies demonstrate that our proposed algorithms can efficiently support cooperative communications in multi-radio multi-hop networks to significantly increase the aggregate throughput.

Cooperative communication (CC) for wireless networks has gained a lot of recent interests. With its ability of mitigating fading by exploiting spatial diversity, CC has the potential to significantly increase the capacity of wireless networks. However, most of the works on CC are limited to single radio wireless network. To demonstrate the benefits of CC in multi-radio multi-hop wireless network, this paper studies a joint problem of multi-radio cooperative routing and relay assignment to maximize the minimum rate among a set of concurrent communication sessions. We first model this problem as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem and prove it to be NP-hard. Then we propose a centralized algorithm and a distributed algorithm to solve the problem. The centralized algorithm is designed within a branch-and-bound framework by using the relaxation of the formulated MILP, which can find a global (1 + ε)-optimal solution. Our distributed algorithm includes two sub-algorithms: a cooperative route selection sub-algorithm and a fairness-aware route adjustment sub-algorithm. Our simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms and the significant rate gains that can be achieved by incorporating CC in multi-radio multi-hop networks.