Many-to-Many Communication: A New Approach for Collaboration in MANETs

We introduce a collaboration-driven approach to the sharing of the available bandwidth in wireless ad hoc networks, which we call many-to-many cooperation, that allows concurrent many-to-many communication. This scheme is based on the integration of multi-user detection and position-location information with frequency and code division in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Transmissions are divided in frequency and codes according to nodal locations, and successive interference cancellation (SIC) is used at receivers to allow them to decode and use all transmissions from strong interfering sources. Consequently, the interference is divided into constructive interference (COI) and destructive interference (DEI). We show that, if each node is allowed to expand its bandwidth, both the link's Shannon capacity and the per source-destination throughput scale like
O
(n
^alpha/2
) (upper-bound) and Omega[f(n)] (lower-bound), for n nodes in the network, a path loss parameter alpha > 2, and 1 les f(n) < n
^alpha/2
. Many-to-many cooperation allows multi-copy relaying of the same packet, which reduces the packet delivery delay compared to single-copy relaying without any penalty in capacity.