It is shown that when n identical randomly located nodes form a wireless network, the throughput (n) obtainable by each node is ( 1 p n log n ). This result is true whether the situation is homogeneous with the nodes independently and uniformly distributed on the surface S 2 of a sphere, or the nodes are located on a disk in the plane and routing hot spots form in the center. It is further shown that even if the nodes are optimally placed, and each transmission's range is optimally chosen, the throughput cannot exceed 1 p n , irrespective of how the channel is subdivided. In fact the bit-distance product that can be transported by the network per second is O( p n), irrespective of how the demands are distributed. Fundamentally, it is the need for every node all over the domain to share whatever portion of the channel it is utilizing with nodes in its local neighborhood that is the reason for the constriction in capacity. Some implications may be worth considering by designers. Since the throughput furnished to each user diminishes to zero as the number of users is increased, perhaps y Please address all correspondence to the second author. z These results were presented at the ActComm Technical Review, Dartmouth College, Oct. 19-20, 1998
Seminal work of Gupta and Kumar REF initiated the investigation on how the throughput of wireless networks scales with n, the number of nodes.
The capacity of wireless networks
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
Computer Science