Theoretical capacity of multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks

The capacity of multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks is presented extending the cross-layer model for link capacity in [1]. Two semantics for network capacity are proposed and discussed. The effect of node location on capacity is analyzed within the context of the boundary condition and its impact on evaluation of network capacity. The main focus is on the bottleneck capacity referred to as the "maximum instantaneous network capacity" (MIC). The metric is intended to characterize the true information capacity of the network as a whole-reflecting all possible destinations. The optimization problem is shown to be NP-complete and heuristic algorithms are applied to bound the solution from above. The asymptotic results compare favorably to the well-known results of the highly abstract model in [2].