  We study the problem of channel pairing and power allocation in a
multichannel multihop relay network to enhance the end-to-end data rate. Both
amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relaying strategies are
considered. Given fixed power allocation to the channels, we show that channel
pairing over multiple hops can be decomposed into independent pairing problems
at each relay, and a sorted-SNR channel pairing strategy is sum-rate optimal,
where each relay pairs its incoming and outgoing channels by their SNR order.
For the joint optimization of channel pairing and power allocation under both
total and individual power constraints, we show that the problem can be
decoupled into two subproblems solved separately. This separation principle is
established by observing the equivalence between sorting SNRs and sorting
channel gains in the jointly optimal solution. It significantly reduces the
computational complexity in finding the jointly optimal solution. It follows
that the channel pairing problem in joint optimization can be again decomposed
into independent pairing problems at each relay based on sorted channel gains.
The solution for optimizing power allocation for DF relaying is also provided,
as well as an asymptotically optimal solution for AF relaying. Numerical
results are provided to demonstrate substantial performance gain of the jointly
optimal solution over some suboptimal alternatives. It is also observed that
more gain is obtained from optimal channel pairing than optimal power
allocation through judiciously exploiting the variation among multiple
channels. Impact of the variation of channel gain, the number of channels, and
the number of hops on the performance gain is also studied through numerical
examples.
