research-article

The capacity of wireless networks: information-theoretic and physical limits

Authors:

Massimo Franceschetti,

Marco Donald Migliore,

Paolo MineroAuthors Info & Claims

IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Volume 55, Issue 8

Pages 3413 - 3424

https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.2009.2023705

Published: 01 August 2009 Publication History

Abstract

It is shown that the capacity scaling of wireless networks is subject to a fundamental limitation which is independent of power attenuation and fading models. It is a degrees of freedom limitation which is due to the laws of physics. By distributing uniformly an order of n users wishing to establish pairwise independent communications at fixed wavelength inside a two-dimensional domain of size of the order of n, there are an order of n communication requests originating from the central half of the domain to its outer half. Physics dictates that the number of independent information channels across these two regions is only of the order of √n, so the per-user information capacity must follow an inverse square-root of n law. This result shows that information-theoretic limits of wireless communication problems can be rigorously obtained without relying on stochastic fading channel models, but studying their physical geometric structure.

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cover image IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

IEEE Transactions on Information Theory Volume 55, Issue 8

August 2009

480 pages

ISSN:0018-9448

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Copyright © 2009.

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IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 01 August 2009

Revised: 09 February 2009

Received: 30 October 2007

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