Optimal Scaling of Multicommodity Flows in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks: Beyond the Gupta-Kumar Barrier

The price, performance and form factors of sensors, processors, storage elements, and radios today are at a point that the age of viable large-scale ad-hoc networks would appear to be finally upon one. Alas, Gupta and Kumar's seminal work cautions one to the contrary. They studied the capacity of wireless ad-hoc networks with n nodes when receivers are static, transmit or receive one packet at a time, and the network traffic consists of n unicast sessions. Their conclusion was a rather negative one: the capacity of ad-hoc networks does not scale with an increase in network size.