About the Capacity of Flat and Self-Organized Ad Hoc and Hybrid Networks

Abstract

Ad hoc networking specific challenges foster a strong research effort on efficient protocols design. Routing protocols based on a self-organized structure have been studied principally for the robustness and the scalability they provide. On the other hand, self-organization schemes may decrease the network capacity since they concentrate the traffic on privileged links. This paper presents four models for evaluating the capacity of a routing schemes on 802.11 like networks. Our approach consists in modeling the radio resource sharing principles of 802.11 like MAC protocols as a set of linear constraints. We have implemented two models of fairness. The first one assumes that nodes have a fair access to the channel, while the second one assumes that on the radio links. We then develop a pessimistic and an optimistic scenarii of spatial re-utilization of the medium, yielding a lower bound and an upper bound on the network capacity for each fairness case. Our models are independent of the routing protocols and provide therefore a relevant framework for their comparison. We apply our models to a comparative analysis of the well-known shortest path base flat routing protocol OLSR against two main self-organized structure approaches, VSR, and Wu & Li's protocols. This study concludes on the relevance of self-organized approaches from the network capacity point of view.