Capacity of Hybrid Wireless Networks With Long-Range Social Contacts Behavior

Hybrid wireless network is composed of both ad hoc transmissions and cellular transmissions. Under the L-maximum-hop routing policy, flow is transmitted in the ad hoc mode if its source and destination are within L hops away; otherwise, it is transmitted in the cellular mode. Existing works study the hybrid wireless network capacity as a function of L so as to find the optimal L to maximize the network capacity. In this paper, we consider two more factors: traffic model and base station access mode. Different from existing works, which only consider the uniform traffic model, we consider a traffic model with social behavior. We study the impact of traffic model on the optimal routing policy. Moreover, we consider two different access modes: one-hop access (each node directly communicates with base station) and multi-hop access (node may access base station through multiple hops due to power constraint). We study the impact of access mode on the optimal routing policy. Our results show that: 1) the optimal L does not only depend on traffic pattern, but also the access mode; 2) one-hop access provides higher network capacity than multi-hop access at the cost of increasing transmitting power; and 3) under the one-hop access mode, network capacity grows linearly with the number of base stations; however, it does not hold with the multi-hop access mode, and the number of base stations has different effects on network capacity for different traffic models.