Minimum power routing for multihop cellular networks

In multihop cellular networks, mobiles with no good path to any base station may instead relay their calls through other mobiles with better propagation conditions. This can improve coverage and capacity, and reduce the required total transmission power, but its effectiveness depends greatly on the routing strategy used. This paper investigates the minimum possible aggregate transmit power in the presence of interference in a single-cell multihop cellular network. The new concept of interference-sensitive link costs is introduced, and is shown to perform substantially better than routing based solely on path loss, which is optimal in the noise-limited case.