Throughput and Delay in Cooperative Wireless Networks With Partial Infrastructure

Hybrid wireless networks have been shown to scale only when the number of base stations m is on the same order of the number of nodes n in the network. Pure wireless ad hoc networks with multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) distributed communications have also been shown to scale. A natural question arises: Do hybrid wireless networks always scale no matter how many base stations are placed if MIMO distributed communications are used? In this paper, we address this question and show that hybrid wireless networks cannot always scale with the proposed resource-allocation strategy. Specifically, they can only scale either when m = Theta(1) and all resources are exclusively allocated to ad hoc mode transmissions or when m = Theta(n), and all resources are exclusively allocated to infrastructure mode transmissions; moreover, the delay is significantly large in the first case, whereas it is Theta(1) in the second case, where Theta(f(n)) means on the order of f(n) when n is large.