Capacity of Wireless Networks With Social Characteristics

This paper studies the throughput capacity of wireless networks with social characteristics. We propose a simple model to reflect both the social relations between nodes and power-law node degree distribution, and then examine their impact on capacity. We show the fact that two features above lead to traffic locality and improve capacity. Moreover, multicasting may be employed to further enhance performance when information is desired to be published from the source to all its contacts, of which the number follows power-law distribution. In addition, we propose the corresponding capacity-achieving communication schemes, which optimally exploit the underlying structure. Our study is an attempt to understand how social relations may impact on network capacity from a theoretical perspective, and provides fundamental insight on the design and analysis of real wireless networks.