Broadcast Capacity for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

In wireless ad hoc networks, wireless nodes may cooperate in routing each others' packets. Lack of a centralized control of the functionality and possible node mobility give rise to many challenging issues at the network, medium access and physical layers of a wireless ad hoc network. At the network layer, the main challenging problem is that of routing, which has to deal with time-varying network topology, possible power-constraints of wireless nodes, and the characteristics of the wireless channel (such as unstable, broadcast nature, fading and so on). The choice of medium access control is also restricted by the fact that the network topology is time-varying, and there is no centralized control.