Abstract
Hybrid networks are a promising architecture that builds ad hoc, wireless networks around the existing cellular telephony infrastructure. For improving spatial reuse in a cellular network, we consider augmenting it with wireless ad hoc connectivity. The coverage area of each base-station is reduced and the users that are within the area relay traffic to nodes outside the area; these users further relay data to more distant users within the cell. The resulting network is referred to as a Hybrid network. While this approach can result in shorter range higher-rate links and improved spatial reuse which, together favour a capacity increase, it relies on multi-hop forwarding which is detrimental to the overall capacity. The objective of this work is to evaluate the impact of these conflicting factors on the capacity of the hybrid network. We formally define the capacity of the network as the maximum possible downlink throughput under the conditions of max-min fairness.