Optimal Routing and Power Control for a Single Cell, Dense, Ad Hoc Wireless Network

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how to optimize hop length and power control in a dense, single-cell ad hoc wireless network to maximize transport capacity under power constraints, assuming saturation and multihop relaying.

Contribution

It introduces an optimization framework for joint hop length and power control in dense single-cell ad hoc networks to enhance transport capacity.

Findings

Single cell operation is efficient for dense networks with single user decoding.

Optimal hop length and power control significantly improve transport capacity.

The framework provides guidelines for network design under power constraints.

Abstract

We consider a dense, ad hoc wireless network, confined to a small region. The wireless network is operated as a single cell, i.e., only one successful transmission is supported at a time. Data packets are sent between sourcedestination pairs by multihop relaying. We assume that nodes self-organise into a multihop network such that all hops are of length d meters, where d is a design parameter. There is a contention based multiaccess scheme, and it is assumed that every node always has data to send, either originated from it or a transit packet (saturation assumption). In this scenario, we seek to maximize a measure of the transport capacity of the network (measured in bit-meters per second) over power controls (in a fading environment) and over the hop distance d, subject to an average power constraint. We first argue that for a dense collection of nodes confined to a small region, single cell operation is efficient for single user decoding transceivers. Then, operating the dense ad hoc wireless network (described above) as a single cell, we study the hop length and power control that maximizes the transport capacity for a given network power constraint.