Patent ID: 8159954

Claim:
A method of determining link cost for routing in an at least partially wireless multihop network, said method comprising the steps of: estimating, for a wireless link between a pair of network nodes where at least one of the nodes is configured for operation with multiple antennas to provide for multiple channels, multi-channel characteristics between the nodes including an M×N dimensional complex channel gain vector or matrix H ij , between node v i and node v j : H = [ h 11 … h 1 ⁢ N ⋮ ⋱ ⋮ h M ⁢ ⁢ 1 … h MN ] where h mn is a complex representation of the channel between transmit antenna n in a first one of said nodes and receive antenna m in a second one of said nodes, where at least one of N and M is greater than 1 to provide for multi-channel behavior; and determining link cost for said wireless link based on the estimated multi-channel characteristics including said M×N dimensional complex channel gain vector or matrix H ij , wherein the link cost is determined based on the inverse of the average rate according to: Δ C ij =1 / r ij , where the average rate for a link from node v i to v j is determined based on the complex channel gain vector or matrix H ij of dimension M×N, defined between node v i and node v j according to: r _ ij = B · E ⁡ ( log 2 ⁡ ( Det ⁡ ( I i + P i N · σ ⁢ N 2 · H ij · H ij H ) ) ) , where B is the bandwidth, which may be neglected if only one common bandwidth is used in the whole system, E{ . . . } is an optional expectation value, Det{ . . . } is the determinant, I i is the identity matrix of dimension M by M, P i is the transmit power of node v i , σ N 2 is one or both of the noise level at node v j and average interference apart from receiver noise, and H is the Hermitian operator.