Stability–throughput tradeoff and routing in multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks

We study the throughput of multi-hop routes and stability of forwarding queues in a wireless ad-hoc network with random access channel. We focus on a wireless network with static nodes, such as community wireless networks. Our main result is characterization of stability condition and the end-to-end throughput using the balance rate. We also investigate the impact of routing on end-to-end throughput and stability of intermediate nodes. We show that (i) as long as the intermediate queues in the network are stable, the end-to-end throughput of a connection does not depend on the load on the intermediate nodes, (ii) we show that if the weight of a link originating from a node is set to the number of neighbors of this node, then shortest-path routing maximizes the minimum probability of end-to-end packet delivery in a network of weighted fair queues. Numerical results are given and support the results of the analysis. Finally, we perform extensive simulation and verify that the analytical results closely match the results obtained from simulations.