Exact capacity study for a class of MANETs

Abstract

The lacking of a thorough understanding on the capacity in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) has been stunting their applications in the last decade. Available capacity studies focus on exploring either the order sense capacity scaling laws, the closed-form capacity under some specific routing protocols, or the exact capacity without careful consideration of wireless interference issue in MANETs. In this paper, we explore the exact network capacity for a class of MANETs, where the group-based scheduling is adopted to schedule simultaneous link transmissions. We first determine a general closed-form capacity upper bound for the considered MANETs, which holds for any possible routing protocols in such networks. We then show that for any traffic input rate within the upper bound, there exists a corresponding two-hop relay algorithm to stabilize the network, which proves that the upper bound we determined is the exact capacity for this class of MANETs. Finally, simulation studies are presented to validate our theoretical results.