Hierarchical Cooperation Achieves Linear Capacity Scaling in Ad Hoc Networks

n source and destination pairs randomly located in a fixed area want to communicate with each other. It is well known that classical multihop architectures that decode and forward packets can deliver at most a radicn-scaling of the aggregate throughput. The performance is limited by the mutual interference between communicating nodes. We show however that a linear scaling of the capacity with n can in fact be achieved by more intelligent node cooperation and distributed MIMO communication. The key ingredient is a hierarchical and digital architecture for nodal exchange of information for realizing the cooperation.