WirelessNetworksCapacity

Foreword

To make it very clear at the beginning: The capacity problem as presented in this article is not mainly related to wireless networks but rather to all kind of peer-to-peer networks. That is, the presented capacity problem does not only occur in wireless networks but in all kind of multihop networks, which are organised in a peer-to-peer manner. So this has nothing to do with the interference problems (e.g. hidden node, exposed node).

Intuitively, one could think that the more nodes join a wireless peer-to-peer net, the more capacity is available to each node. This maybe naive idea is somewhat lead by assuming that more nodes mean more redundant routes, which in return means more transportable traffic. In the end, this article tries to explain why this is not true.

I would also like to mention that this article is very much based on two papers, which can be found in the references section.

MANET with optimally and radomly placed nodes

In the following we will look at to the following two distinct setups of wireless ad-hoc networks. First we will consider a MANET with optimally placed nodes. Then we will look at how the capacity available to each node evolves when the nodes are randomly placed.

MANET with optimally placed nodes

Let's consider a MANET with optimally placed nodes.

Assumptions

each node's transmission range is optimal no interference