On the broadcast capacity of wireless multihop interference networks

Abstract

This paper is concerned with wireless broadcasting in multihop networks where a selected number of relay nodes may aid the source node in the broadcast under a given total energy and hop constraint. We study an ad-hoc network with infinitely many nodes and analytically find the number and positions of rebroadcasting relay nodes to achieve the optimal broadcast capacity. The interference due to multiple transmissions in the geographical area is taken into account. Based on the theoretical findings, we then propose one distributed and one centralized heuristic for relay selection in wireless broadcasting. We discuss the broadcast capacity performances and CSI (channel state information) requirements of these algorithms. The results illustrate that the benefits of peer-assisted broadcasting are more pronounced in the centralized relay selection algorithm when compared to the fully randomized and distributed selection under a realistic system model.