Multihop Cellular: A New Architecture for Wireless Communications

This work presents a new architecture, Multihop Cellular Network (MCN), for wireless communications. MCN preserves the benefit of conventional single-hop cellular networks (SCN) where the service infrastructure is constructed by fixed bases, and it also incorporates the flexibility of ad-hoc networks where wireless transmission through mobile stations in multiple hops is allowed. MCN can reduce the required number of bases or improve the throughput performance, while limiting path vulnerability encountered in ad-hoc networks. In addition, MCN and SCN are analyzed, in terms of mean hop count, hop-by-hop throughput, end-to-end throughput, and mean number of channels (i.e. simultaneous transmissions) under different traffic localities and transmission ranges. Numerical results demonstrate that throughput of MCN exceeds that of SCN, the former also increases as the transmission range decreases. Above results can be accounted for by the different orders, linear and square, at which mean hop count and mean number of channels increase, respectively. Keywords— multihop, cellular, ad-hoc networks, packet radio, transmission range