Capacity of wireless networks under SINR interference constraints

Abstract

A fundamental problem in wireless networks is to estimate their throughput capacity-given a set of wireless nodes and a set of connections, what is the maximum rate at which data can be sent on these connections. Most of the research in this direction has focused either on random distributions of points, or has assumed simple graph-based models for wireless interference. In this paper, we study the capacity estimation problem using a realistic Signal to Interference Plus Noise Ratio (SINR) model for interference, on arbitrary wireless networks without any assumptions on node distributions. The problem becomes much more challenging for this setting, because of the non-locality of the SINR model. Recent work by Moscibroda et al. (IEEE INFOCOM 2006, ACM MobiHoc 2006) has shown that the throughput achieved by using SINR models can differ significantly from that obtained by using graph-based models. In this work, we develop polynomial time algorithms to provably approximate the throughput capacity of wireless network under the SINR model. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.