Overlaid Cellular and Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes overlaying ad hoc networks onto cellular uplinks to improve spectrum utilization, analyzing capacity tradeoffs and demonstrating advantages of frequency separation and spatial diversity through stochastic geometry.

Contribution

It introduces a novel overlay approach for cellular uplinks, providing capacity analysis and demonstrating benefits of frequency separation and spatial diversity.

Findings

Overlaying ad hoc networks improves spectrum utilization.

Frequency separation yields higher capacities than spatial separation.

Spatial diversity enhances network capacities.

Abstract

In cellular systems using frequency division duplex, growing Internet services cause unbalance of uplink and downlink traffic, resulting in poor uplink spectrum utilization. Addressing this issue, this paper considers overlaying an ad hoc network onto a cellular uplink network for improving spectrum utilization and spatial reuse efficiency. Transmission capacities of the overlaid networks are analyzed, which are defined as the maximum densities of the ad hoc nodes and mobile users under an outage constraint. Using tools from stochastic geometry, the capacity tradeoff curves for the overlaid networks are shown to be linear. Deploying overlaid networks based on frequency separation is proved to achieve higher network capacities than that based on spatial separation. Furthermore, spatial diversity is shown to enhance network capacities.