Cost of Local Cooperation in Hierarchical Virtual MIMO Transmission Schemes
27 October 2016
Hierarchical cooperation schemes in wireless networks rely on local cooperation among neighboring nodes to create virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) connections between transmit and receive clusters. It was shown that, by applying the virtual MIMO technique recursively in a hierarchical manner, the sum rate of all source-destination pairs can scale linearly with the number of nodes in the network. In this paper we focus on the impact of local cooperation and establish new capacity bounds for the virtual MIMO transmission taking into account the constraints of local communication both at the transmitters and the receivers. We show that the cost of local communication, which is inevitable to support the virtual MIMO transmission and grows exponentially with the number of layers in the cooperation hierarchy, plays a vital role in determining the overall performance of the hierarchical virtual MIMO cooperation in wireless networks.