  Wireless networks with multiple nodes that relay information from a source to
a destination are expected to be deployed in many applications. Therefore,
understanding their design and performance under practical constraints is
important. In this work, we propose and study three multihopping decode and
forward (MDF) protocols for multistage half-duplex relay networks with no
direct link between the source and destination nodes. In all three protocols,
we assume no cooperation across relay nodes for encoding and decoding.
Numerical evaluation in illustrative example networks and comparison with cheap
relay cut-set bounds for half-duplex networks show that the proposed MDF
protocols approach capacity in some ranges of channel gains. The main idea in
the design of the protocols is the use of coding in interference networks that
are created in different states or modes of a half-duplex network. Our results
suggest that multistage half-duplex relaying with practical constraints on
cooperation is comparable to point-to-point links and full-duplex relay
networks, if there are multiple non-overlapping paths from source to
destination and if suitable coding is employed in interference network states.
