Scaling Laws for Ad Hoc Wireless Networks: An Information Theoretic Approach

Abstract

In recent years there has been significant and increasing interest in ad hoc wireless networks. The design, analysis and deployment of such wireless networks necessitate a fundamental understanding of how much information transfer they can support, as well as what the appropriate architectures and protocols are for operating them. This monograph addresses these questions by presenting various models and results that quantify the information transport capability of wireless networks, as well as shed light on architecture design from a high level point of view. The models take into consideration important features such as the spatial distribution of nodes, strategies for sharing the wireless medium, the attenuation of signals with distance, and how information is to be transferred, whether it be by encoding, decoding, choice of power level, spatio-temporal scheduling of transmissions, choice of multi-hop routes, or other modalities of cooperation between nodes. An important aspect of the approach is to characterize how the information hauling capacity scales with the number of nodes in the network.