Capacity of Regular Ad Hoc Networks with Multipacket Reception

In this paper, the effects of multipacket reception (MPR) capability on the capacity of wireless networks with regular structures are analyzed. Under uniform traffic and minimum connectivity, the maximum stable packet generation rate for the MPR Manhattan networks is obtained. For a network of size N , it is shown that the capacity is K1/ √ N , and adding MPR affects the coefficient K1 of a non-MPR network by no more than 1.6 times. For the same network the stability region of the slotted ALOHA random access protocol with MPR is shown to be K2/ √ N , for some constant K2 < K1. For increased connectivity, it is shown that the capacity can be increased further by adding MPR. In the limiting case, in a fully connected network, MPR increases the capacity linearly. These results indicate that minimum connectivity for MPR networks is not necessarily optimal. For non-uniform traffic, MPR can contribute much more to particular nodes which have sink type of traffic, and the dual concept of multipacket transmission (MPT) is very useful for source type of nodes. In other words, MPR and MPT can boost the throughput of the network also by being selectively added to the nodes that bottleneck the performance.