Multihop network capacity estimation

The research of Gupta and Kumar (March 2000) gave a proportional relationship of the network capacity. We propose a simple approach to deriving the multihop radio network capacity in this paper. This approach is not only able to give the proportional relationship, but it also presents an explicit formulation of the network capacity as well. The formulation is applicable to both the trend prediction of large network and capacity estimation of a small network. This result is valuable for both the theoretical research and for practical performance estimation of multihop radio network. In addition, the methodology can easily be extended to more complex cases, as illustrated by our three-dimensional study. We also implement an ideal network model to verify the capacity derivation, and theoretically prove that the formula is consistent with the previous research works. From the derivation of the formula, most of the important parameters that affect the capacity are discussed and possible approaches to capacity improvement are proposed.