A Framework for the Capacity Evaluation of Multihop Wireless Networks

The specific challenges of multihop wireles networks lead to a strong research effort on efficient protocols design where the offered capacity is a key objective. More specifically, routing strategy largely impacts the network capacity, i.e. the throughput offered to each flow. In this work, we propose a complete framework to compute the upper and the lower bounds of the network capacity according to a physical topology and a given routing protocol. The radio resource sharing principles of CSMA-CA is modeled as a set of linear constraints with 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 scenarios for radio resource sharing, yielding a lower bound and an upper bound on the network capacity for each fairness case. Our approach is independent of the network topology and the routing protocols, and provides therefore a relevant framework for their comparison. We apply our models to a comparative analysis of a well-known flat routing protocol OLSR against two main self-organized structure approaches, VSR and localized CDS.