The capacity of Multihop Relay Wireless Networks

The scaling laws of wireless networks are studied when there are s(n) source-destination pairs in the network and the rest of n - s(n) nodes are relays. The transmission strategy is based on multihop communications which is more practical in wireless ad hoc networks. We call this network Multihop Relay Wireless Network (MRWN). It is shown that as the number of sources in the network increases (or equivalently the number of relays decreases), the capacity of such networks is either dominated by the number of source-destination pairs or by the number of relays. Both upper and lower bounds of throughput capacity are derived.