This paper develops upper bounds on the end-to-end transmission capacity of multihop wireless networks. Potential source-destination paths are dynamically selected from a pool of randomly located relays, from which a closed-form lower bound on the outage probability is derived in terms of the expected number of potential paths. This is in turn used to provide an upper bound on the number of successful transmissions that can occur per unit area, which is known as the transmission capacity. The upper bound results from assuming independence among the potential paths, and can be viewed as the maximum diversity case. A useful aspect of the upper bound is its simple form for an arbitrary-sized network, which allows insights into how the number of hops and other network parameters affect spatial throughput in the nonasymptotic regime. The outage probability analysis is then extended to account for retransmissions with a maximum number of allowed attempts. In contrast to prevailing wisdom, we show that predetermined routing (such as nearest neighbor) is suboptimal, since more hops are not useful once the network is interference-limited. Our results also make clear that randomness in the location of relay sets and dynamically varying channel states is helpful in obtaining higher aggregate throughput, and that dynamic route selection should be used to exploit path diversity.
We develop a new metric for quantifying end-to-end throughput in multihop wireless networks, which we term random access transport capacity, since the interference model presumes uncoordinated transmissions. The metric quantifies the average maximum rate of successful end-to-end transmissions, multiplied by the communication distance, and normalized by the network area. We show that a simple upper bound on this quantity is computable in closed-form in terms of key network parameters when the number of retransmissions is not restricted and the hops are assumed to be equally spaced on a line between the source and destination. We also derive the optimum number of hops and optimal per hop success probability and show that our result follows the well-known square root scaling law while providing exact expressions for the preconstants, which contain most of the design-relevant network parameters. Numerical results demonstrate that the upper bound is accurate for the purpose of determining the optimal hop count and success (or outage) probability. We consider a network where each route comprises a backlogged source, a number of relays and a destination at a finite distance. The locations of the sources and the relays are realizations of independent Poisson point processes. Given that the nodes observe a TDMA ALOHA MAC protocol, our objective is to determine the number of relays and their placement such that the mean end-to-end delay in a typical route of the network is minimized.We first study an idealistic network model where all routes have the same number of hops, the same distance per hop and their own dedicated relays. Combining tools from queueing theory and stochastic geometry, we provide a precise characterization of the mean end-to-end delay. We find that the delay is minimized if the first hop is much longer than the remaining hops and that the optimal number of hops scales sublinearly with the source-destination distance. Simulating the original network scenario reveals that the analytical results are accurate, provided that the density of the relay process is sufficiently large. We conclude that, given the considered MAC protocol, our analysis provides a delay-minimizing routing strategy for random, multihop networks involving a small number of hops. This paper presents the evaluation of the multi-hop aggregate information efficiency of the slotted and unslotted ALOHA protocols. We consider a multi-hop wireless network where the nodes are spatially characterized by a Poisson point process and the traffic generation also follows a Poisson distribution. By applying the properties of stochastic geometry, we derive a closed-form lower bound on the outage probability as a function of the required communication rate, the single-hop distance, the number of hops and the maximum number of retransmissions. The results indicate that slotted ALOHA always outperforms its unslotted version, demonstrating the importance of synchronization in distributed networks. In addition, we show that it is always possible to optimize the network efficiency by properly setting the required rate for a given packet density. Finally, in the scenario considered, the use of retransmissions and multiple hops never achieves the best performance if compared to the option of single-hop links without retransmissions. The goal of this paper is to establish which practical routing schemes for wireless networks are most suitable for power-limited and bandwidth-limited communication regimes. We regard channel state information (CSI) at the receiver and point-to-point capacity-achieving codes for the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel as practical features, interference cancellation (IC) as possible, but less practical, and synchronous cooperation (CSI at the transmitters) as impractical. We consider a communication network with a single source node, a single destination node, and N-1 intermediate nodes placed equidistantly on a line between them. We analyze the minimum total transmit power needed to achieve a desired end-to-end rate for several schemes and demonstrate that multihop communication with spatial reuse performs very well in the power-limited regime, even without IC. However, within a class of schemes not performing IC, single-hop transmission (directly from source to destination) is more suitable for the bandwidth-limited regime, especially when higher spectral efficiencies are required. At such higher spectral efficiencies, the gap between single-hop and multihop can be closed by employing IC, and we present a scheme based upon backward decoding that can remove all interference from the multihop system with an arbitrarily small rate loss. This new scheme is also used to demonstrate that rates of O(log N) are achievable over linear wireless networks even without synchronous cooperation. Delay-reliability (D-R), and throughput-delay-reliability (T-D-R) tradeoffs in an ad hoc network are derived for single hop and multi-hop transmission with automatic repeat request (ARQ) on each hop. The delay constraint is modeled by assuming that each packet is allowed at most D retransmissions end-to-end, and the reliability is defined as the probability that the packet is successfully decoded in at most D retransmissions. The throughput of the ad hoc network is characterized by the transmission capacity, where the transmission capacity is defined to be the maximum density of spatial transmissions that can be simultaneously supported in an ad hoc network under quality of service (QoS) constraints (maximum retransmissions and reliability). The transmission capacity captures the T-D-R tradeoff as it incorporates the dependence between the throughput, the maximum delay, and the reliability. Given an end-to-end retransmission constraint of D, the optimal allocation of the number of retransmissions allowed at each hop is derived that maximizes a lower bound on the transmission capacity. Optimizing over the number of hops, single hop transmission is shown to be optimal for maximizing a lower bound on the transmission capacity in the sparse network regime. We consider a frequency-flat fading multihop network with a single active source-destination pair terminals communicating over multiple hops through a set of intermediate relay terminals. We use Shannon-theoretic tools to analyze the tradeoff between energy efficiency and spectral efficiency (known as the power-bandwidth tradeoff) for a simple communication protocol based on time-division decode-and-forward relaying in meaningful asymptotic regimes of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) under a system-wide power constraint on source and relay transmissions. The impact of multi-hopping and channel fading on the key performance measures of the high and low SNR regimes is investigated to shed new light on the possible enhancements in power bandwidth efficiency and link reliability. In contrast to the common belief that in fading environments communicating over multiple hops suffers significantly in performance due to the worst link limitation, our results indicate that hopping could significantly improve the outage behavior over slow-fading networks and stabilize links against the random channel fluctuations. In particular, we prove that there exists an optimal number of hops that minimizes the end-to-end outage probability and characterize the dependence of this optimal number on the fading statistics and target energy and spectral efficiencies.