On Capacity and Delay of Multichannel Wireless Networks with Infrastructure Support

In this paper, we propose a novel multichannel network with infrastructure support, which is called an MC-IS network, that has not been studied in the literature. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study such an MC-IS network. Our proposed MC-IS network has a number of advantages over three existing conventional networks: a single-channel wireless ad hoc network (called an SC-AH network), a multichannel wireless ad hoc network (called an MC-AH network), and a single-channel network with infrastructure support (called an SC-IS network). In particular, the network capacity of our proposed MC-IS network is √{n log n} times higher than that of an SC-AH network and an MC-AH network and the same as that of an SC-IS network, where $n$ is the number of nodes in the network. The average delay of our MC-IS network is √{log n/n} times lower than that of an SC-AH network and an MC-AH network and min{C_I},m} times lower than the average delay of an SC-IS network, where C_I and m denote the number of channels dedicated for infrastructure communications and the number of interfaces mounted at each infrastructure node, respectively. Our analysis on an MC-IS network equipped with omnidirectional antennas has been extended to an MC-IS network equipped with directional antennas only, which are named as an MC-IS-DA network. We show that an MC-IS-DA network has an even lower delay of c/([{2}π\θ] C_I) compared with an SC-IS network and our MC-IS network. For example, when C_I=12 and θ=π/12, an MC-IS-DA can further reduce the delay by 24 times lower than that of an MC-IS network and by 288 times lower than that of an SC-IS network.