On the Capacity of Multi-Hop Wireless Networks with Heterogeneous Antennas

Abstract

Recently, the use of directional antennas in multi-hop wireless networks has received increasing attention in the research community due to their potential benefits and numerous advantages over omni-directional antennas. However, the majority of existing work has focused on homogeneous wireless networks where all the nodes are equipped with the same beamforming antennas. In this work, we focus on multi-hop wireless networks with heterogeneous antennas capabilities, a scenario that is expected to prevail in next generation wireless networks. We address the fundamental question: Given a specific network topology with heterogeneous antennas, what are the theoretical capacity bounds of such network? For that purpose, we formulate the problem as an optimization problem and compute the upper and lower bounds. Our results show that the capacity of heterogeneous multi-hop wireless networks can be significantly increased even with small fraction of directional nodes.