Improving End-to-end Throughput in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks With Cut-Through Capability

Wireless cut-through transmission, based on in-band full-duplex (FD) technique, has a great potential to improve the end-to-end throughput of a multi-hop wireless network via enabling simultaneous multi-hop relaying transmissions in the same frequency band. Different from single-hop relaying transmission in traditional half-duplex multi-hop network, cut-through transmission has multiple relaying transmission modes, which makes it more difficult to achieve the maximum end-to-end throughput via improving the spatial reuse in a multi-hop wireless network. The goal of this paper is to improve the end-to-end throughput in multi-hop wireless networks with cut-through capability. In particular, we first establish an effective analytical model and find that the achievable end-to-end throughput is mainly determined by the cut-through mode, the spatial reuse factor, the protocol overhead, and the channel rate. Then, we give a comprehensive analysis for these factors in a string-topology multi-hop wireless network. In order to improve the end-to-end throughput in a practical distributed multi-hop wireless network, we design a low-overhead distributed medium access control (MAC) protocol, and propose a transmit-delay mechanism to improve spatial reuse and link scheduling. Furthermore, we design an algorithm to adaptively select the transmission parameters, including the cut-through mode, the spatial reuse factor, and the channel rate. Extensive simulations show that the proposed MAC design can effectively improve the end-to-end throughput by more than 55 percent, compared with the state-of-the-art protocol.