On the Catalyzing Effect of Randomness on the Per-Flow Throughput in Wireless Networks

This paper investigates the throughput capacity of a flow crossing a multi-hop wireless network, whose geometry is characterized by general randomness laws including Uniform, Poisson, Heavy-Tailed distributions for both the nodes’ densities and the number of hops. The key contribution is to demonstrate $\mathit{\text{how}}$ the $\mathit{\text{per-flow}}\mathit{\text{throughput}}$ depends on the distribution of 1) the number of nodes $N_j$ inside hops’ interference sets, 2) the number of hops $K$, and 3) the degree of spatial correlations. The randomness in both $N_j$’s and $K$ is advantageous, i.e., it can yield larger scalings (as large as $\mathrm{\Theta }(n)$) than in non-random settings. An interesting consequence is that the per-flow capacity can exhibit the opposite behavior to the network capacity, which was shown to suffer from a logarithmic decrease in the presence of randomness. In turn, spatial correlations along the end-to-end path are detrimental by a logarithmic term.