Throughput Optimization for Hierarchical Cooperation in Ad Hoc Networks

For a wireless network with n nodes distributed in an area A, with n source-destination pairs communicating with each other at some common rate, the hierarchical cooperation scheme proposed in [A. Ozgur et al., 2007] is studied and optimized by choosing the number of hierarchical stages and the corresponding cluster sizes that maximize the total throughput. It turns out that increasing the number of stages does not necessarily increase the throughput, and the closed-form solutions for the optimization problem can be explicitly obtained. Based on the expression of the maximum achievable throughput, it is found that the hierarchical scheme achieves a scaling with the exponent depending on n.