Calculating End-to-End Throughput Capacity in Wireless Networks with Consideration of Hidden Nodes and Multi-Rate Terminals

To determine the end-to-end throughput capacity of a multi-hop route in wireless networks, existing work either use a simplistic approach to divide the 1-hop throughput capacity by the number of contending links in the bottleneck region, which has limitations in terms of accuracy, or rely on complicated non-linear equations, which is impractical to solve for a large number of hops. In this paper, we present an optimization methodology to analytically calculate the end-to-end throughput capacity of IEEE 802.11-based multi-hop wireless networks. The calculation considers the interference due to neighboring nodes and assess the impact of hidden node collision as well as multi-rate terminals (i.e., nodes can transmit at different rates) on throughput capacity. The proposed methodology provides a very accurate calculation of the end-to-end throughput capacity when compared to existing work, and yet it is more practical to implement.