Large-scale wireless networks have many important applications. However, Gupta and Kumar showed that the capacity of multi-hop wireless networks decreases as the number of nodes in the network increases. Subsequent research efforts to achieve linear capacity scaling have significant limitations such as long latency, high technical complexity, restricted traffic pattern, or infrastructure requirement, etc. We propose to achieve Close-To-Linear (CTL) capacity scaling through the usage of Directed Energy (DE) links such as laser communications links or highly directional pencil beam links in the EHF band in a hybrid network that also contains traditional Omni-Directional (OD) antenna links. Our approach has none of limitations mentioned earlier. Furthermore, and no less importantly, our approach addresses another challenging problem in large-scale networking: it is very costly to distribute routing information. We show that under a particular link probability distribution, global information is not required to achieve CTL capacity scaling.;We also study the effect of obstacles found in a network area on the formation of the DE links. We derive the necessary update on the DE links random distribution function to accommodate for the existance of obstacles in the network area.
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