A closer look at the physical and protocol models for wireless ad hoc networks with multi-packet reception

In this paper, we compute the throughput capacity of wireless ad hoc network when nodes are capable of multi-packet reception (MPR) under the physical model. Earlier results show that the optimistic protocol model [1] provides a tight bound of Theta(D(n)) where D(n) and n denote the decoding range and the number of nodes in the network respectively. On the other hand, the throughput capacity under the more practical physical model using successive interference cancelation (SIC) [2] has a tight bound of Theta(D(n)^(1-2/Theta)/n^1/Theta) where Theta is the path loss parameter. Motivated by the fact that protocol model provides higher throughput capacity than physical model, we investigated the throughput capacity with MPR in physical model utilizing maximum likelihood decoding(MLD) algorithm. Using this optimum decoding strategy, we demonstrate that the physical and protocol models render the same capacity.