Capacity Of Wireless Ad Hoc Networks, A Survey

Recent years have seen the burgeon of wireless Ad hoc networks, devices with wireless interfaces can be connected to each other in pure ad hoc fashion or through infrastructures. As one of the most basic concerns, the capacity of such networks have received much attention from the researchers, especially after the pioneer works done by Gupta and Kumar [1]. Current researches generally follow either of the two tracks, one is the theoretical track, which meanly concern what is the theoretical bounds of the capacity, or in other words, how fast the data can be sent from source nodes to their destinations in such networks. They strive to find both upper and lower bounds and these results may serve as guidelines on evaluating how good a real network is. The other track emphasizes more on the practical aspects, which concentrates on constructing optimal scheduling mechanisms to achieve the theoretical bound, although capacity is not necessarily the only goal of optimization. In fact, it has been found recently that capacity is in fact in contradict with other optimization goals such as connectivity [46], delay [43] and fairness [47]. In this survey, we will mainly follow the theoretical track and put great emphasise on the models used to facilitate analysis in state of art works.