A Communication-Theoretic Approach to Ad Hoc Wireless Networking

The remarkable surge in research on ad hoc wireless networks is largely due to their potential in offering insfrastructureless communications. While initially studied adopting a "conventional" networking approach, based upon years of research experience on wired computer networks (with virtually error-free communication links), the presence of unreliable wireless communication links necessitates a communication-theoretic foundation for the design and analysis of wireless ad hoc networks. Such a novel comprehensive "bottom-up" perspective was, for the first time, presented in OK Tonguz et al. (2006). In this paper, we summarize the communication-theoretic framework, where the impact of physical layer on the network performance and its interaction with higher layers is taken into account. The main goal of this paper is to provide the reader with the intuition behind the comprehensive approach, rather than the mathematical details of the approach