Capacity of Multichannel Wireless Networks Under the Protocol Model

This paper studies the capacity of a
n
node static wireless network with
c
channels and
m
radio interfaces per node under the protocol model of interference. In their seminal work, Gupta and Kumar have determined the capacity of a single channel network (
c
=1,
m
=1). Their results are also applicable to multichannel networks provided each node has one interface per channel (
m
=
c
) . However, in practice, it is often infeasible to equip each node with one interface per channel. Motivated by this observation, we establish the capacity of general multichannel networks (
m
les
c
). Equipping each node with fewer interfaces than channels in general reduces network capacity. However, we show that one important exception is a random network with up to
O
(log
n
) channels, where there is no capacity degradation even if each node has only one interface. Our initial analysis assumes that the interfaces are capable of switching channels instantaneously, but we later extend our analysis to account for interface switching delays seen in practice. Furthermore, some multichannel protocols proposed so far rarely require interfaces to switch, and therefore, we briefly study the capacity with fixed interfaces as well.