Network Information Theory for Wireless Communications Conference Paper uri icon

abstract

  • Two fundamental questions arise concerning the emerging field of wireless networks. First, how much information can be carried over a wireless network with a multiplicity of nodes? Second, how should one operate wireless networks to realize this capacity? We establish that under a high attenuation regime, wireless networks obey a linear scaling law for the transport capacity, and the order optimal strategy is to relay packets from node to node after fully decoding them at each hop. This attenuation regime may be what normally prevails. There is currently much activity in the protocol development community in realizing this multi-hop mode of operation. On the other hand, when the attenuation is very low, superlinear scaling is feasible, and a strategy of coherent cooperation by upstream nodes to relay a packet to the next downstream node, along with decoding by interference cancellation, can be order optimal. These network information theoretic results provide a bridge between information theory and protocol development.

name of conference

  • IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, 2003. Proceedings.

published proceedings

  • IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, 2003. Proceedings.

author list (cited authors)

  • Xie, L., & Kumar, P. R.

citation count

  • 7

complete list of authors

  • Xie, Liang-Liang||Kumar, PR

publication date

  • January 2003