Fundamental Limits of Information Dissemination in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

We present capacity and delay scaling laws for random wireless ad hoc networks under all information dissemination modalities (unicast, multicast, broadcast and anycast) when nodes are endowed with multi-packet reception (MPR) capabilities. Information dissemination modalities are modeled with an (n, m, k)-cast formulation, where n, m, and k denote the number of nodes in the network, the number of destinations for each communication group, and the actual number of communication group members that receives the information (i. e., k ≤ m ≤ n), respectively. We show that Θ(R(n)\√m/k), Θ(1/k), and Θ(R <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> (n)) bits per second constitute a tight bound for the throughput capacity of random wireless ad hoc networks under the protocol model when m = O(R <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-2</sup> (n)), Ω(k) = R <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-2</sup> (n)= O(m), and k = Ω(R <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-2</sup> (n)), respectively. R(n) denotes the receiver range which depends on the decoding complexity of the nodes. For the minimum receiver range of Θ(√(log n/n)) to guarantee network connectivity, a gain of Θ(log n) for (n, m, k)-casting is attained with MPR compared to the capacity attained when receivers can decode at most one transmission at a time in . Furthermore, we derive the capacity-delay tradeoff of (n, m, k)-casting when MPR is used. We show that the use of MPR can lead to both increased network capacity and reduced delays in wireless ad hoc networks.