Optimized network structure and routing metric in wireless multihop ad hoc communication

TL;DR

This paper introduces optimized network structures and a new routing metric for wireless multihop ad hoc networks, significantly enhancing throughput performance through topology control and modified betweenness centrality.

Contribution

It proposes a novel use of modified betweenness centrality for network optimization and routing, improving throughput in wireless multihop ad hoc networks.

Findings

Optimized network structures increase end-to-end throughput.

Modified betweenness centrality is effective for network modeling.

New routing metric further enhances throughput capacity.

Abstract

Inspired by the Statistical Physics of complex networks, wireless multihop ad hoc communication networks are considered in abstracted form. Since such engineered networks are able to modify their structure via topology control, we search for optimized network structures, which maximize the end-to-end throughput performance. A modified version of betweenness centrality is introduced and shown to be very relevant for the respective modeling. The calculated optimized network structures lead to a significant increase of the end-to-end throughput. The discussion of the resulting structural properties reveals that it will be almost impossible to construct these optimized topologies in a technologically efficient distributive manner. However, the modified betweenness centrality also allows to propose a new routing metric for the end-to-end communication traffic. This approach leads to an even larger increase of throughput capacity and is easily implementable in a technologically relevant manner.