Capacity of wireless ad-hoc broadcast networks under realistic channel models

Abstract

In a wireless broadcasting scenario, some of the nodes can help the source node by forwarding the received information. Due to the interference from multiple transmissions, selection of these nodes directly affects the performance of the system under a given total power and hop constraint. In this paper, we first analytically find the number and the positions of the rebroadcasting nodes that achieve the optimal broadcast capacity under the continuum model. Following the results of this part, we propose two heuristics, one centralized and another distributed, for relay selection in practical scenarios. Then, we discuss the broadcast capacity performances of these algorithms under different system settings. The results illustrate that using a distributed relay selection method brings significant gains to the broadcast capacity under a realistic system model.