The optimal throughput order of wireless ad hoc networks and how to achieve it

We show that, as the number of nodes in the network n tends to infinity, the maximum concurrent flow (MCF) and the minimum cut-capacity scale as Theta(n²r³(n)/k) for a random choice of k ges Theta(n) source-destination pairs, where r(n) is the communication range in the network. In addition, we show that it is possible to attain this optimal order throughput in interference-constrained networks if nodes are capable of multiple-packet transmission and reception. This result provides an improvement of Theta(nr²(n)) over the highest achieved capacity reported to date. Furthermore, in stark contrast to the conventional wisdom that has evolved from the Gupta-Kumar results, our results show that the capacity of ad-hoc networks can actually increase with n while the communication range tends to zero!