The problem of communication among nodes in an is considered, where radio power decay and interference are limiting factors. It has been shown previously that, with simple multi-hopping, the achievable total communication rate in such a network is at most @math . In this work, we study the benefit of node cooperation in conjunction with multi-hopping on the network capacity. We propose a multi-phase communication scheme, combining distributed MIMO transmission with multi-hop forwarding among clusters of nodes. We derive the network throughput of this communication scheme and determine the optimal cluster size. This provides a constructive lower bound on the network capacity. We first show that in a rate of @math can be achieved with transmission power scaling of @math , where @math is the signal path-loss exponent. We further extend this result to , where we show a rate of @math can be achieved with transmission power scaling of @math in a random network with unit node density. In particular, as @math approaches 2, only constant transmission power is required. Finally, we study a random network with density @math and show that a rate of @math is achieved and the required power scales as @math .
@cite_9: This paper deals with throughput scaling laws for random ad hoc wireless networks in a rich scattering environment. We develop schemes to optimize the ratio lambda(n) of achievable network sum capacity to the sum of the point-to-point capacities of source-destinations (S-D) pairs operating in isolation. Our focus in this paper is on fixed signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) networks, i.e., networks where the worst case SNR over the S-D pairs is fixed independent of n. For such fixed SNR networks, which include fixed area networks as a special case, we show that collaborative strategies yield a scaling law of lambda(n)=Omega(1 n1 3) in contrast to multihop strategies which yield a scaling law of lambda(n)=Theta(1 radicn). While networks where worst case SNR goes to zero do not preclude the possibility of collaboration, multihop strategies achieve optimal throughput. The plausible reason is that the gains due to collaboration cannot offset the effect of vanishing receive SNR. This suggests that for fixed SNR networks, a network designer should look for network protocols that exploit collaboration
Finally, Aeron and Saligrama in @cite_9 have studied the effect of node cooperation on the capacity of wireless networks with a fixed receiver SNR at all nodes and obtained @math network throughput, through spatially separated MIMO relays which collaborate in their transmissions. However, the assumption of constant receiver SNR at all nodes implies that the transmission power needs to scale as @math . In contrast, in this work we show that with much lower power scaling, the same communication rate can be achieved by using multi-hop distributed MIMO transmissions.