Comparison of hierarchical and fully distributed mobile packet radio networks

Abstract

The authors compare the performance of a mobile packet radio network with a hierarchical structure with one which is fully distributed. The network end-to-end throughput is used as the performance measure. The authors define the performance of network end-to-end throughput to be the number of network nodes times the inverse of the average end-to-end transmission delay for a node. It can be interpreted as the average number of packets successfully arriving at destinations per unit time in the network. To analyze the performance of the hierarchical network, first, a local-access algorithm is proposed. The local access scheme is designed for low cost nodes, which are required to provide the basic functions of receiving and transmitting packets with a fixed power radius. The authors show that the hierarchical network outperforms the fully distributed network for most scenarios due to the significant decrease in the average number of hops and increase in frequency reuse.