Capacity of a wireless ad hoc network with infrastructure

Benyuan Liu, Patrick Thiran, Don Towsley
2007 Proceedings of the 8th ACM international symposium on Mobile ad hoc networking and computing - MobiHoc '07  
We study the capacity of a wireless ad hoc network with infrastructure, where well-connected base stations are placed in an ad hoc network to relay data traffic for wireless nodes. This network architecture presents a tradeoff between a cellular network and an ad hoc network in that data may be forwarded in a multi-hop fashion or through the infrastructure. It has been shown that the capacity of ad hoc network does not scale well with the number of nodes in the system [1] . In this work, we
more » ... stigate the potential benefit of infrastructure network to improve ad hoc network capacity. Analytical expressions are obtained for the capacity of an ad hoc networks with infrastructure. For an ad hoc network of £ nodes with ¤ base stations, the results show that, if ¤ grows asymptotically slower than ¥ £ , the benefit of infrastructure network is insignificant. However, if ¤ grows faster than ¥ £ , the capacity increases linearly with the number of base stations, providing an effective improvement over ad hoc networks. Therefore, in order to achieve non-negligible capacity gain, the investment in the wired infrastructure should be sufficiently high.
doi:10.1145/1288107.1288140 dblp:conf/mobihoc/LiuTT07 fatcat:wmumgr5sifg7plbpgfrx6illou