Impact of Multidirectional Forwarding on the Capacity of Large Wireless Networks

We consider the capacity problem in large wireless multihop networks by separating the problem into macroscopic and microscopic level subproblems. At the macroscopic level, the task is to determine the routes that are geometric curves. At the microscopic level, we need to forward the traffic according to its directional distribution that results from the macroscopic level routes. Previous studies have treated the macroscopic level problem simply as that of load balancing, implying the use of time sharing to serve the traffic flowing in different directions. We study how a scheduling that truly interleaves the traffic flows in different directions affects the macroscopic level problem. We restrict the macroscopic routes to certain simple path sets. This together with earlier results on the microscopic level forwarding capacity allows us to obtain new results on the macroscopic level capacity that demonstrate the gains from multidirectional forwarding.