Placing repeaters in multi-hop packet radio networks

One of the main factors that limit the throughput in multihop packet radio networks is the large number of hops over which some pairs of nodes must communicate. The authors present a heuristic algorithm to sequentially place an arbitrary number of repeaters with the objective of maximizing the throughput of the resulting networks. The heuristic attempts to reduce the average number of hops that packets must be transmitted over, without increasing interference at the nodes. Even if the average number of hops is not reduced significantly, it creates a number of other paths (of the same length), and thus congestion is avoided. Results are presented for one particular protocol, code division multiple access with noise threshold θ. The authors also present instances for which the heuristic fails, with an explanation of why it fails