End-to-end throughput capacity in multi-hop wireless networks

A fundamental issue in MWNs is that the end-to-end performance degrades quickly with hop counts and the degree of traffic aggregation at each hop. This disparity problem in MWNs worsens further when client traffic is forwarded via a series of relay nodes towards the destination through a series of tandem contention domains. Owing to the broadcast nature of the wireless medium, the end-to-end throughput is not only limited by the data rate of the individual links along the path, but also inversely affected by the hearing range and level of activity of the participating nodes. In this paper, we approximate node throughputs in MWNs by examining the underlying hop contention graph, along with hop counts and traffic aggregates. We show that node throughputs depend greatly on the location of nodes in relation to their hops away from the gateway and on the number of nodes in its sensing and transmission range.