The degrees of freedom of wireless networks: information-theoretic and physical limits

Abstract

It is shown from first principles and without relying on stochastic fading channel models that the number of spatial degrees of freedom of wireless networks can in principle grow linearly with the number of nodes, provided that the network is surrounded by a rich scattering environment. Hence, linear capacity scaling is physically possible in certain three dimensional geometries. However, it is also noted that these geometric configurations provide a physical possibility, but might be far from practical reality.