Capacity of multi-hop wireless network with frequency agile software defined radio

Abstract

With the advance of both hardware and software technologies, the concept of software defined radio (SDR) is becoming more and more popular in the academic and industrial communities. Its popularity has been increased by the recent intensive research of cognitive radio technology, which is built on top of SDR. One of key features of SDR is its capability of frequency agility, which means a single SDR can access multiple channels, subject to a certain total frequency bandwidth (channel span) constraint. Compared with the traditional multiple-radio solutions, the SDR setup has the advantages of higher flexibility and reduced hardware size (cost). In this paper, we investigate the achievable capacity of a wireless network with single-SDR equipped transceivers, especially a multiple-hop network, for any given network flows. We propose new approaches to formulate the single-SDR constraint, which is unique for the derivation of capacity upper bounds. We also propose a heuristic algorithm to obtain a lower bound for the capacity. Both numerical and simulation results are presented to demonstrate the potential capacity for an SDR network and compared it with a multipleradio network.