Distributed forwarding in multiuser multihop wireless networks

This thesis is concerned with physical layer signal processing and fundamental performance limits in wireless multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multihop networks. Such networks consist of a stage of source antennas, one or several stages of relay antennas and a stage of destination antennas. Signals traverse all these stages (one at a time) from source to destination antennas on the same physical channel. The schemes proposed in this work aim for transferring performance gains that are well known to be enabled by multiple transmit and receive antennas in point-to-point channels to this more general topology. Particular interest is on (i) capacity scaling in the number of antennas per stage, (ii) spatial multiplexing and diversity gain.