Multihop MIMO Relay Networks with ARQ

Abstract

A multiple antenna multihop relay network consisting of a source, a relay, and a destination node, is considered. The diversity-multiplexing-delay tradeoffs (DMDT) for various multihop ARQ protocols are obtained. It is shown that the tradeoff region is limited by the performance of the weakest link, and hence the optimal ARQ protocol should balance the link performances by allocating the ARQ rounds among all links. Based on this argument, a Variable Block-Length (VBL) ARQ protocol is proposed and its DMDT-optimality is shown.