Haddad †

In this paper we study the broadcast capacity of multihop wireless networks which we define as the maximum rate at which broadcast packets can be generated in the network such that all nodes receive the packets successfully in a limited time. We employ the Protocol Model for successful packet reception usually adopted in network capacity studies and provide novel upper and lower bounds for the broadcast capacity for arbitrary connected networks. In a homogeneous dense network these bounds simplify to Θ(W / max(1, ∆ d)) where W is the wireless channel capacity, ∆ the interference parameter, and d the number of dimensions of space in which the network lies. Interestingly, we show that the broadcast capacity does not change by more than a constant factor when we vary the number of nodes, the radio range, the area of the network, and even the node mobility. To address the achievability of capacity, we demonstrate that any broadcast scheme based on a backbone of size proportional to the Minimum Connected Dominating Set guarantees a throughput within a constant factor of the broadcast capacity. Finally, we demonstrate that broadcast capacity, in stark contrast to unicast capacity, does not depend on the choice of source nodes or the dimension of the network