Random access transport capacity of multihop AF relaying: a throughput-reliability tradeoff

To determine the capacity of distributed wireless networks (i.e., ad hoc networks), the random access transport capacity was proposed as the average maximum rate of successful end-to-end transmission in the distance. In this article, we consider the random access transport capacity for multihop relaying to find the end-to-end throughput of a wireless ad hoc network, where each node relays the signal using an amplify-and-forward (AF) strategy. In particular, we analyze the exact outage probability for multihop AF relaying in the presence of both co-channel interference and thermal noise, where interferers are spatially distributed following a Poisson distribution. In our numerical results, it is observed that the maximum random access transport capacity is achieved at a specific spatial density of transmitting nodes due to the throughput-reliability tradeoff as the number of transmitting nodes (=interferers) increases. We compute the optimal spatial density of transmitting nodes that maximize their random access transport capacity. As a result, we can obtain the actual random access transport capacity of multihop AF relaying and predict the maximum number of transmitting nodes per unit area to maximize their performance.