  This paper considers the problem of energy-efficient transmission in
multi-flow multihop cooperative wireless networks. Although the performance
gains of cooperative approaches are well known, the combinatorial nature of
these schemes makes it difficult to design efficient polynomial-time algorithms
for joint routing, scheduling and power control. This becomes more so when
there is more than one flow in the network. It has been conjectured by many
authors, in the literature, that the multiflow problem in cooperative networks
is an NP-hard problem. In this paper, we formulate the problem, as a
combinatorial optimization problem, for a general setting of $k$-flows, and
formally prove that the problem is not only NP-hard but it is
$o(n^{1/7-\epsilon})$ inapproxmiable. To our knowledge*, these results provide
the first such inapproxmiablity proof in the context of multiflow cooperative
wireless networks. We further prove that for a special case of k = 1 the
solution is a simple path, and devise a polynomial time algorithm for jointly
optimizing routing, scheduling and power control. We then use this algorithm to
establish analytical upper and lower bounds for the optimal performance for the
general case of $k$ flows. Furthermore, we propose a polynomial time heuristic
for calculating the solution for the general case and evaluate the performance
of this heuristic under different channel conditions and against the analytical
upper and lower bounds.
