N-Hop networks: a general framework for wireless systems

This article introduces a unified framework for quantitative characterization of various wireless networks. We first revisit the evolution of centralized, ad-hoc and hybrid networks, and discuss the trade-off between structure-ensured reliability and efficiency, and ad-hoc enabled flexibility. Motivated by the observation that the number of hops for a basic node in the network to reach the base station or the sink has a direct impact on the network capacity, delay, efficiency and their evaluation techniques, we introduce the concept of the N-hop networks. It can serve as a general framework that includes most existing network models as special cases, and can also make the analytical characterization of the network performance more tractable. Moreover, for network security, it is observed that hierarchical structure enables easier tracking of user accountability and malicious node detection; on the other hand, the multi-layer diversity increases the network reliability under unexpected network failure or malicious attacks, and at the same time, provides a flexible platform for privacy protection.