The capacity of heterogeneous wireless networks

  • Authors:
  • Pan Li;Yuguang Fang

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS;University of Florida, Gainesville, FL and National Key Laboratory of Integrated Services Networks, Xidian University, Xi'an, China

  • Venue:
  • INFOCOM'10 Proceedings of the 29th conference on Information communications
  • Year:
  • 2010

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Although capacity has been extensively studied in wireless networks, most of the results are for homogeneous wireless networks where all nodes are assumed identical. In this paper, we investigate the capacity of heterogeneous wireless networks with general network settings. Specifically, we consider a dense network with n normal nodes and m = nb (0 b b(n) and length 1/b(n), where b(n) = nw and -1/2 w ≤ 0. We assume there are n flows in the network. All the n normal nodes are sources while only randomly chosen nd (0 d n normal nodes are uniformly and independently distributed, while the m helping nodes are either regularly placed or uniformly and independently distributed, resulting in two different kinds of networks called Regular Heterogeneous Wireless Networks and Random Heterogeneous Wireless Networks, respectively. In this paper, we attempt to find out what a heterogeneous wireless network with general network settings can do by deriving a lower bound on the capacity. We also explore the conditions under which heterogeneous wireless networks can provide throughput higher than traditional homogeneous wireless networks.