More is less: Connectivity in fractal regions

Ad-hoc networks are often deployed in regions with complicated boundaries. We show that if the boundary is modeled as a fractal, a network requiring line of sight connections has the counterintuitive property that increasing the number of nodes decreases the full connection probability. We characterise this decay as a stretched exponential involving the fractal dimension of the boundary, and discuss mitigation strategies. Applications of this study include the analysis and design of sensor networks operating in rugged terrain (e.g. railway cuttings), mm-wave networks in industrial settings and vehicle-to-vehicle/vehicle-to-infrastructure networks in urban environments.Comment: 5 page

Connectivity of confined 3D Networks with Anisotropically Radiating Nodes

Nodes in ad hoc networks with randomly oriented directional antenna patterns typically have fewer short links and more long links which can bridge together otherwise isolated subnetworks. This network feature is known to improve overall connectivity in 2D random networks operating at low channel path loss. To this end, we advance recently established results to obtain analytic expressions for the mean degree of 3D networks for simple but practical anisotropic gain profiles, including those of patch, dipole and end-fire array antennas. Our analysis reveals that for homogeneous systems (i.e. neglecting boundary effects) directional radiation patterns are superior to the isotropic case only when the path loss exponent is less than the spatial dimension. Moreover, we establish that ad hoc networks utilizing directional transmit and isotropic receive antennas (or vice versa) are always sub-optimally connected regardless of the environment path loss. We extend our analysis to investigate boundary effects in inhomogeneous systems, and study the geometrical reasons why directional radiating nodes are at a disadvantage to isotropic ones. Finally, we discuss multi-directional gain patterns consisting of many equally spaced lobes which could be used to mitigate boundary effects and improve overall network connectivity.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figure