Half-duplex routing is NP-hard

Routing is a widespread approach to transfer information from a source node to a destination node in many deployed wireless ad-hoc networks. Today's implemented routing algorithms seek to efficiently find the path/route with the largest Full-Duplex (FD) capacity, which is given by the minimum among the point-To-point link capacities in the path. Such an approach may be suboptimal if then the nodes in the selected path are operated in Half-Duplex (HD) mode. Recently, the capacity (up to a constant gap that only depends on the number of nodes in the path) of an HD line network (i.e., a path) has been shown to be equal to half of the minimum of the harmonic means of the capacities of two consecutive links in the path. This paper asks the question of whether it is possible to design a polynomial-Time algorithm that efficiently finds the path with the largest HD capacity in a relay network. The problem of finding such a path is shown to be NP-hard in general. However, if the number of cycles in the network is polynomial in the number of nodes, then a polynomial-Time algorithm can indeed be designed.