Capacity of Wireless Networks with Social Behavior

Abstract

The capacity of a wireless network is studied when nodes communicate with one another in the context of social groups. All the nodes are assumed to have the same number of independent long-range social contacts, one of which each selects randomly as its destination. The Euclidean distance between a source and its social group members follows a power-law distribution and communication between any two nodes takes place only within the physical transmission range resulting in communication over multi-hop paths. The capacity order of such a composite network is derived as a function of the number of nodes, the social-group concentration, and the size of social groups. Our results demonstrate that when each node has constant number of contacts which does not increase with network size growth, and are geographically concentrated, then the network behaves similar to social networks and communication network does not have any effect on the throughput capacity. On the other hand, when the social contact population grows in time, or social connectivity among nodes is highly distributed, then the communication network is the dominant factor and the composite network behaves similar to wireless networks, i.e., the capacity is the same as Gupta and Kumar results. When neither social connectivity nor communication network is dominant, then the throughput capacity results are between these two extreme cases.