Capacity of Wireless Networks with Social Behavior and Directional Antennas

When social behaviors are considered into ad hoc wireless networks, the users prefer to forward the traffic from their social contacts. In this way, the network capacity is highly related with the social characteristics. To this end, we apply a social contact based wireless network model and explore its throughput capacity. The wireless network capacity will get improved when the contacts are located nearby the source node. Directional antennas are applied to further enhance the capacity performance, which can reduce the interference brought by other simultaneous communications. Our results demonstrate that when the wireless communications are dominated by the short-distance social contact traffics, the throughput capacity can be greatly improved. Meanwhile, when the directional antenna beamwidth theta is at the order of Omega(1/root log n), the throughput capacity is a constant. The wireless network with social contacts is scalable.