The Multi-radio Advantage

This paper concerns multi-hop networks with multiple physical interfaces, and more particularly with multiple radios. For these networks, we investigate the advantage provided by the presence of multiple radios and specifically their impact on metrics such as link connectivity and network diameter and their resilience to link failures, and the length of shortest paths. Our results show that "super additivity" properties for the metrics investigated can be achieved by activating the multiple radios available at the nodes. For instance, we show that topologies that with respect to one radio have link connectivity lambda(1) and according to the other radio have link connectivity lambda(2), when combined into one multi-radio network yield a link connectivity which is > lambda(1) + lambda(2). Two different topology formation algorithms are investigated for single-radio networks and the advantage of their composition into a multi-radio network is demonstrated via extensive simulations in realistic scenarios.