Transmission Capacity of Two-Way Communication in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Wireless ad hoc networks require bidirectional data transmission to support two-way traffic and control functions like packet acknowledgement. Most prior work on the capacity of wireless ad hoc networks, however, has focused only on one-way communication. In this paper we develop the concept of transmission capacity of two-way communication in wireless ad hoc networks. The transmission capacity has been used extensively to analyze one-way ad hoc networks - in this paper we provide a generalization that incorporates the concept of a two-way outage. We derive an upper bound and an approximation for the two-way transmission capacity, which are shown to be relatively tight for small outage probability constraints. We also quantify how the two-way success requirement reduces network capacity. Our numerical and simulation results show that for certain two-way networks the capacity loss is considerable.