Beyond Multi-Hop: Optimal Cooperation in Large Wireless Networks

Multi-hop is the traditional architecture for wireless adhoc networks. In this paper, we investigate the potential gains from more sophisticated cooperation in large wireless adhoc networks. While the capacity of multi-hop is limited to ⊖(√(n)) due to interference, we show that a hierarchical cooperation architecture can achieve linear capacity scaling in the number of users n. We also characterize how the cooperation gain is affected when the network is limited in either power or space.