A Communication Architecture for Large Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Capacity scaling in wireless networks under homogeneous node placement and traffic demands has been widely studied over the last decade. In general networks, however, both the node placement and traffic demands can be highly nonuniform. In this paper, we present a communication architecture that operates a wireless network under such heterogeneous settings. The proposed scheme includes the existing communication schemes for large wireless networks--multi-hopping, cooperative communication, cooperative multi-hopping--as special cases. We illustrate through a few specific wireless network scenarios that the proposed scheme can perform significantly better, even scaling-wise, than any of these previous schemes.