On the Capacity of Hybrid Wireless Networks with Opportunistic Routing

This paper studies the capacity of hybrid wireless networks with opportunistic routing (OR). We first extend the opportunistic routing algorithm to exploit high speed data transmissions in infrastructure network through base stations. We then develop linear programming models to calculate the end-to-end throughput bounds from multiple source nodes to single, as well as, multiple destination nodes. The developed models are applied to study several hybrid wireless network examples. Through case studies, we investigate several factors that have significant impacts on the hybrid wireless network capacity under opportunistic routing, such as node transmission range, density and distribution pattern of base stations (BTs), number of wireless channels on wireless nodes and base stations, etc. Our numerical results demonstrate that opportunistic routing could achieve much higher throughput on both ad-hoc and hybrid networks than traditional unicast routing (UR). Moreover, opportunistic routing can efficiently utilize base stations and achieve significantly higher throughput gains in hybrid wireless networks than in pure ad-hoc networks especially with multiple-channel base stations.