A study on the capacity bounds of wireless ad hoc networks from peer-to-peer to multiple nodes cooperation

Shannon´s paper in 1948 has enticed researchers to explore the capacity of networks. Roughly two decades later, van der Meulen introduced relay channels and Cover introduced the idea of broadcasting and taking advantage of spatial diversity. Since then, numerous researchers have placed their focuses on different aspects of peer-to-peer networks. This paper covers three different bounds that deal with peer-to-peer networks as well as cooperative networks beyond the peer-to-peer sense. First, a novel idea of applying information theory to switching networks to allow an easily computable bound for studying the behavior of an ad hoc network via various parameters is introduced. Second, multiple nodes cooperatively relaying packets is simulated to determine the benefits of allowing more nodes to cooperate together. It is found that more than two nodes cooperating together provided insignificant gain over the two-node cooperation. The result leads to modeling a network with two-node cooperation under a frequency reuse scheme. The result shows that cooperation is useful in a small network, but the gain in capacity diminishes as SNR increases.