Multihop Routing in Ad Hoc Networks

This paper presents a dual method of closed-form analysis and lightweight simulation that enables an evaluation of the performance of mobile ad hoc networks that is more realistic, efficient, and accurate than those found in existing publications. Some features accommodated by the new analysis are shadowing, exclusion and guard zones, and distance-dependent fading. Three routing protocols are examined: least-delay, nearest-neighbor, and maximum-progress routing. The tradeoffs among the path reliabilities, average conditional delays, average conditional number of hops, and area spectral efficiencies are examined.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, to appear in IEEE Military Commun. Conf. (MILCOM), 201

High-SIR Transmission Capacity of Wireless Networks with General Fading and Node Distribution

In many wireless systems, interference is the main performance-limiting factor, and is primarily dictated by the locations of concurrent transmitters. In many earlier works, the locations of the transmitters is often modeled as a Poisson point process for analytical tractability. While analytically convenient, the PPP only accurately models networks whose nodes are placed independently and use ALOHA as the channel access protocol, which preserves the independence. Correlations between transmitter locations in non-Poisson networks, which model intelligent access protocols, makes the outage analysis extremely difficult. In this paper, we take an alternative approach and focus on an asymptotic regime where the density of interferers $\eta$ goes to 0. We prove for general node distributions and fading statistics that the success probability \p \sim 1-\gamma \eta^{\kappa} for $\eta \rightarrow 0$, and provide values of $\gamma$ and $\kappa$ for a number of important special cases. We show that $\kappa$ is lower bounded by 1 and upper bounded by a value that depends on the path loss exponent and the fading. This new analytical framework is then used to characterize the transmission capacity of a very general class of networks, defined as the maximum spatial density of active links given an outage constraint.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Trans. Info Theory special issu

Role of Interference and Computational Complexity in Modern Wireless Networks: Analysis, Optimization, and Design

Owing to the popularity of smartphones, the recent widespread adoption of wireless broadband has resulted in a tremendous growth in the volume of mobile data traffic, and this growth is projected to continue unabated. In order to meet the needs of future systems, several novel technologies have been proposed, including cooperative communications, cloud radio access networks (RANs) and very densely deployed small-cell networks. For these novel networks, both interference and the limited availability of computational resources play a very important role. Therefore, the accurate modeling and analysis of interference and computation is essential to the understanding of these networks, and an enabler for more efficient design.;This dissertation focuses on four aspects of modern wireless networks: (1) Modeling and analysis of interference in single-hop wireless networks, (2) Characterizing the tradeoffs between the communication performance of wireless transmission and the computational load on the systems used to process such transmissions, (3) The optimization of wireless multiple-access networks when using cost functions that are based on the analytical findings in this dissertation, and (4) The analysis and optimization of multi-hop networks, which may optionally employ forms of cooperative communication.;The study of interference in single-hop wireless networks proceeds by assuming that the random locations of the interferers are drawn from a point process and possibly constrained to a finite area. Both the information-bearing and interfering signals propagate over channels that are subject to path loss, shadowing, and fading. A flexible model for fading, based on the Nakagami distribution, is used, though specific examples are provided for Rayleigh fading. The analysis is broken down into multiple steps, involving subsequent averaging of the performance metrics over the fading, the shadowing, and the location of the interferers with the aim to distinguish the effect of these mechanisms that operate over different time scales. The analysis is extended to accommodate diversity reception, which is important for the understanding of cooperative systems that combine transmissions that originate from different locations. Furthermore, the role of spatial correlation is considered, which provides insight into how the performance in one location is related to the performance in another location.;While it is now generally understood how to communicate close to the fundamental limits implied by information theory, operating close to the fundamental performance bounds is costly in terms of the computational complexity required to receive the signal. This dissertation provides a framework for understanding the tradeoffs between communication performance and the imposed complexity based on how close a system operates to the performance bounds, and it allows to accurately estimate the required data processing resources of a network under a given performance constraint. The framework is applied to Cloud-RAN, which is a new cellular architecture that moves the bulk of the signal processing away from the base stations (BSs) and towards a centralized computing cloud. The analysis developed in this part of the dissertation helps to illuminate the benefits of pooling computing assets when decoding multiple uplink signals in the cloud. Building upon these results, new approaches for wireless resource allocation are proposed, which unlike previous approaches, are aware of the computing limitations of the network.;By leveraging the accurate expressions that characterize performance in the presence of interference and fading, a methodology is described for optimizing wireless multiple-access networks. The focus is on frequency hopping (FH) systems, which are already widely used in military systems, and are becoming more common in commercial systems. The optimization determines the best combination of modulation parameters (such as the modulation index for continuous-phase frequency-shift keying), number of hopping channels, and code rate. In addition, it accounts for the adjacent-channel interference (ACI) and determines how much of the signal spectrum should lie within the operating band of each channel, and how much can be allowed to splatter into adjacent channels.;The last part of this dissertation contemplates networks that involve multi-hop communications. Building on the analytical framework developed in early parts of this dissertation, the performance of such networks is analyzed in the presence of interference and fading, and it is introduced a novel paradigm for a rapid performance assessment of routing protocols. Such networks may involve cooperative communications, and the particular cooperative protocol studied here allows the same packet to be transmitted simultaneously by multiple transmitters and diversity combined at the receiver. The dynamics of how the cooperative protocol evolves over time is described through an absorbing Markov chain, and the analysis is able to efficiently capture the interference that arises as packets are periodically injected into the network by a common source, the temporal correlation among these packets and their interdependence

Outage and Local Throughput and Capacity of Random Wireless Networks

Outage probabilities and single-hop throughput are two important performance metrics that have been evaluated for certain specific types of wireless networks. However, there is a lack of comprehensive results for larger classes of networks, and there is no systematic approach that permits the convenient comparison of the performance of networks with different geometries and levels of randomness. The uncertainty cube is introduced to categorize the uncertainty present in a network. The three axes of the cube represent the three main potential sources of uncertainty in interference-limited networks: the node distribution, the channel gains (fading), and the channel access (set of transmitting nodes). For the performance analysis, a new parameter, the so-called {\em spatial contention}, is defined. It measures the slope of the outage probability in an ALOHA network as a function of the transmit probability $p$ at $p=0$. Outage is defined as the event that the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) is below a certain threshold in a given time slot. It is shown that the spatial contention is sufficient to characterize outage and throughput in large classes of wireless networks, corresponding to different positions on the uncertainty cube. Existing results are placed in this framework, and new ones are derived. Further, interpreting the outage probability as the SIR distribution, the ergodic capacity of unit-distance links is determined and compared to the throughput achievable for fixed (yet optimized) transmission rates.Comment: 22 pages, 6 figures. Submitted to IEEE Trans. Wireles