| Despite the unprecedented success and proliferation of wireless communication, sustainable reliability and stability among wireless users are still considered important issues in the underlying link protocols. Existing link-layer protocols, like ARQ [44] or HARQ [57,67] approaches are designed to achieve this goal by discarding a corrupted packet at the receiver and performing one or more retransmissions until the packet is successfully decoded or a maximum number of retransmission attempts is reached. These strategies suffer from degradation of throughput and overall system instability since packets need to be en/decode in every hop, leading to high burden for relay nodes especially when the traffic load is high. On the other hand, due to the broadcast nature of wireless communication, when a relay transmits a packet to a specific receiver, it could become interference to other receivers. Thus, rather than activating all the relays simultaneously, we can only schedule a subset of relays in each time slot such that the interference among the links will not cause some transmissions to fail. Accordingly, in this dissertation, we mainly address the following two problems: 1) Relay selection: given a route (i.e., a sequence of relays), how to select the relays to en/decode packets to minimize the latency to reach the destination? 2) Link scheduling: how to schedule relays such that the interference among the relays will not cause transmission failure and the throughput is maximized? (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
