Elastic Routing in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks With Directional Antennas

摘要

Throughput scaling laws of an ad hoc network equipping directional antennasat each node are analyzed. More specifically, this paper considers a generalframework in which the beam width of each node can scale at an arbitrary raterelative to the number of nodes. We introduce an elastic routing protocol,which enables to increase per-hop distance elastically according to the beamwidth, while maintaining an average signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio ateach receiver as a constant. We then identify fundamental operating regimescharacterized according to the beam width scaling and analyze throughputscaling laws for each of the regimes. The elastic routing is shown to achieve amuch better throughput scaling law than that of the conventionalnearest-neighbor multihop for all operating regimes. The gain comes from thefact that more source--destination pairs can be simultaneously activated as thebeam width becomes narrower, which eventually leads to a linear throughputscaling law. In addition, our framework is applied to a hybrid networkconsisting of both wireless ad hoc nodes and infrastructure nodes. As a result,in the hybrid network, we analyze a further improved throughput scaling law andidentify the operating regime where the use of directional antennas isbeneficial.