Multicast capacity of ad hoc networks with transmission uncertainty

We investigate the multicast capacity of ad hoc networks with transmission uncertainty. Previous approaches on the multicast capacity of wireless networks mainly focus on ideal transmission models, e.g., protocol model, physical model or Gaussian channel model. All the above transmission models assume an error-free reception at the receiver node given that the Signal to Interference and Noise Ratio (SINR) at the receiver node exceeds a certain threshold. Using the above ideal transmission model, the per-node multicast capacity was shown to be Θ(1/√kn log n) when k = O(n/log n), and is Θ(1/n) when k = Ω(n/log n). In this paper, we consider more realistic transmission model. We investigate the multicast capacity of ad hoc networks by considering the non-zero probability of erroneous reception at the receiver nodes. We show that for the multicast pattern, the cumulative impact of packet losses over multihops during the transmission from a source node to its destinations will cause a per-node capacity reduction, which behaviors as O(1/kn). We then propose a new scheduling scheme to overcome this limitation, which can increase the per-node capacity to Ω(1/Ωkn (log n)^{α + 2/2(α-2)}), where α > 2 is the path loss exponent.