Capacity Characterization of Multi-Hop Wireless Networks- A Cross Layer Approach

A fundamental problem in multi-hop wireless networks is to estimate their throughout ca-pacity. The problem can be informally stated as follows: given a multi-hop wireless network and a set of source destination pairs, determine the maximum rate r at which data can be transmitted between each source destination pair. Estimating the capacity of a multi-hop wireless network is practically useful — it yields insights into the fundamental performance limits of the wireless network and at the same time aids the development of protocols that can utilize the network close to this limit. A goal of this dissertation is to develop rigorous mathematical foundations to compute the capacity of any given multi-hop wireless network with known source-destination pairs. An important factor that affects the capacity of multi-hop wireless networks is radio interfer-ence. As a result, researchers have proposed increasingly realistic interference models that aim to capture the physical characteristics of radio signals. Some of the commonly used simple models that capture radio interference are based on geometric disk-graphs. The sim-plicity of these models facilitate the development of provable and often conceptually simpl