The optimal throughput order of wireless ad hoc networks and how to achieve it

Abstract

We show that, as the number of nodes in the network n tends to infinity, the maximum concurrent flow (MCF) and the minimum cut-capacity scale as Theta(n2r3(n)/k) for a random choice of k ges Theta(n) source-destination pairs, where r(n) is the communication range in the network. In addition, we show that it is possible to attain this optimal order throughput in interference-constrained networks if nodes are capable of multiple-packet transmission and reception. This result provides an improvement of Theta(nr2(n)) over the highest achieved capacity reported to date. Furthermore, in stark contrast to the conventional wisdom that has evolved from the Gupta-Kumar results, our results show that the capacity of ad-hoc networks can actually increase with n while the communication range tends to zero!