On the transport capacity of wireless ad-hoc networks

We show how transport capacity in bit-meters/s/Hz scales as the node density increases in ad-hoc networks. This was considered by many including [2, 3, 4]. In this paper, we do not consider the scaling law of the transport capacity of the entire network, but focus on the transport capacity of one source-destination pair. We assume opportunistic routing [1] is used to select the best relay node that is closest to the destination among nodes who successfully decode the current packet. We assume the squared channel gain decays as e−αd/dγ , where α ≥ 0 is the absorption constant, γ ≥ 0 is the path exponent, and d is the distance between a transmitter-receiver pair. We assume uniformly distributed nodes in n dimensions. We show the transport capacity is bounded from above if there is no fading. Assuming slow flat Rayleigh fading and α = 0, we show the transport capacity scales as Θ((lnλ)) as the node density λ tends to infinity for one-dimensional networks. For any dimensional network, the transport capacity scales as Θ( √ lnλ) if α = 0 and γ = 2.