On Increasing End-to-End Throughput in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

One of the main characteristics of wireless ad hoc networks is their node-centric broadcast nature of communication, leading to interferences and spatial contention between adjacent wireless links. Due to such interferences, pessimistic concerns have been recently raised with respect to the decreasing network capacity in wireless ad hoc networks when the number of nodes scales to several orders of magnitude higher. In this paper, we argue that in all cases of end-to-end data communications — including oneto-k unicast and multicast data dissemination as well as kto-one data aggregation — the maximum achievable endto-end data throughput (measured on the sources) heavily depends on the strategy of arranging the the topology of transmission between sources and destinations, as well as possible per-node operations such as coding. An optimal strategy achieves better end-to-end throughput than an arbitrary one. We present theoretical studies and critical insights with respect to how these strategies may be designed so that end-to-end throughput may be increased.