Comparison of the Lower Bound for the Capacity of the Wireless Ad Hoc Networks with Cooperating Nodes to the Upper Bound of Conventional Peer-to-Peer Wireless Networks with Hop-by-Hop Routing

The open literature contains numerous studies of capacity bounds for an N-node wireless ad-hoc network but the number of cooperating nodes has generally been limited to two. In this paper, we present a simple time-share lower bound for such a network, but with two or more cooperating nodes. These results are then compared against our previous information theoretic upper bounds with hop-by-hop routing, frequency reuse, and no cooperation. While simulations show that our simple time-share lower bound with cooperation does not outperform our previous upper bound without cooperation, we do note a significant increase in achievable capacity relative to time-share results without cooperation. Also, our results indicate that there is no significant improvement when more than two nodes cooperate.