| Multi-hop wireless networks remain an important research frontier of wireless communications. Multi-hop wireless networks are rapidly deployable to extend the coverage of the Internet, which can be an economical alternative to building new base stations. Multi-hop wireless networks are particularly useful for first responders for disaster relief, and military operations in battlefields. In this thesis, we study power scheduling issues for multi-hop wireless networks. Power scheduling, also known as medium access control consisting of link scheduling, power control and source beamforming, fundamentally governs the capacity of multi-hop wireless networks.;In the first part of this thesis, the achievable network throughput of large-scale multi-hop wireless networks is evaluated under a power scheduling scheme called opportunistic synchronous array method (O-SAM). Under O-SAM, a large network is partitioned into many small subnets, and within each subnet, the link with best channel gain is scheduled for transmission. We examine the impact of traffic load, network topology and multiple antennas on the achievable network throughput. Compared with slotted ALOHA, the throughput of O-SAM is significantly higher. In addition to O-SAM, a distributed synchronous array method (D-SAM) is proposed, and its performance is also evaluated.;In the second part of this thesis, we focus on the power scheduling problem for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) relay networks. A generalized water filling (GWF) theorem is established for link rate maximization with multiple power constraints. The corresponding GWF algorithm is a fast solution to an important class of convex optimization problems. The GWF algorithm is a useful building block for joint source and relay optimization for a multiuser MIMO relay network. We study the power scheduling problems for both uplink and downlink cases of the multiuser MIMO relay network. A number of computational strategies are proposed to maximize the sum rate subject to power constraints or to minimize the sum power subject to rate constraints. |
