In this paper, we propose a novel multichannel network with infrastructure support, which is called an MC-IS network, that has not been studied in the literature. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study such an MC-IS network. Our proposed MC-IS network has a number of advantages over three existing conventional networks: a single-channel wireless ad hoc network (called an SC-AH network), a multichannel wireless ad hoc network (called an MC-AH network), and a single-channel network with infrastructure support (called an SC-IS network). In particular, the network capacity of our proposed MC-IS network is @math times higher than that of an SC-AH network and an MC-AH network and the same as that of an SC-IS network, where @math is the number of nodes in the network. The average delay of our MC-IS network is @math times lower than that of an SC-AH network and an MC-AH network and @math times lower than the average delay of an SC-IS network, where @math and @math denote the number of channels dedicated for infrastructure communications and the number of interfaces mounted at each infrastructure node, respectively. Our analysis on an MC-IS network equipped with omnidirectional antennas has been extended to an MC-IS network equipped with directional antennas only, which are named as an MC-IS-DA network. We show that an MC-IS-DA network has an even lower delay of @math compared with an SC-IS network and our MC-IS network. For example, when @math and @math , an MC-IS-DA can further reduce the delay by 24 times lower than that of an MC-IS network and by 288 times lower than that of an SC-IS network.
This paper studies how the capacity of a static multi-channel network scales as the number of nodes, n, increases. Gupta and Kumar have determined the capacity of single-channel networks, and those bounds are applicable to multi-channel networks as well, provided each node in the network has a dedicated interface per channel.In this work, we establish the capacity of general multi-channel networks wherein the number of interfaces, m, may be smaller than the number of channels, c. We show that the capacity of multi-channel networks exhibits different bounds that are dependent on the ratio between c and m. When the number of interfaces per node is smaller than the number of channels, there is a degradation in the network capacity in many scenarios. However, one important exception is a random network with up to O(log n) channels, wherein the network capacity remains at the Gupta and Kumar bound of Θ(W√noverlog n) bits sec, independent of the number of interfaces available at each node. Since in many practical networks, number of channels available is small (e.g., IEEE 802.11 networks), this bound is of practical interest. This implies that it may be possible to build capacity-optimal multi-channel networks with as few as one interface per node. We also extend our model to consider the impact of interface switching delay, and show that in a random network with up to O(log n) channels, switching delay may not affect capacity if multiple interfaces are used.