Throughput-Delay Trade-off for Hierarchical Cooperation in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks (0802.2013v2)

Abstract: Hierarchical cooperation has recently been shown to achieve better throughput scaling than classical multihop schemes under certain assumptions on the channel model in static wireless networks. However, the end-to-end delay of this scheme turns out to be significantly larger than those of multihop schemes. A modification of the scheme is proposed here that achieves a throughput-delay trade-off $D(n)=(\log n)^2 T(n)$ for T(n) between $\Theta(\sqrt{n}/\log n)$ and $\Theta(n/\log n)$, where D(n) and T(n) are respectively the average delay per bit and the aggregate throughput in a network of n nodes. This trade-off complements the previous results of El Gamal et al., which show that the throughput-delay trade-off for multihop schemes is given by D(n)=T(n) where T(n) lies between $\Theta(1)$ and $\Theta(\sqrt{n})$. Meanwhile, the present paper considers the network multiple-access problem, which may be of interest in its own right.