In [l], Gupta and Kumar determined the capacity of wireless networks under certain assumptions, among them point-to-point coding, which excludes for example multi-access and broadcast codes. In this paper, we consider essentially the same physical model of a wireless network under a different traffic pattern, namely the relay traffic pattern, hut we allow for arhitrarily complex network coding. In our model, there is only one active source/destination pair, while all other nodes assist this transmission. We show code constructions leading to achievable rates and derive upper hounds from the max-flow min-cut theorem. It is shown that lower and upper hounds meet asymptotically as the number of nodes in the network goes to infinity, thus proving that the capacity of the wireless network with n nodes under the relay traffic pattern behaves like log 72 hits per second. This demonstrates also that network coding is essential: under the point-topoint coding assumption considered in [l], the achievable rate is constant, independent of the number of nodes. Moreover, the result of this paper has implications and extensions to fading channels and to sensor networks.
Paper REF analyzes the capacity of wireless networks under the relay traffic pattern.
On the capacity of wireless networks: the relay case
Proceedings.Twenty-First Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies
Proceedings.Twenty-First Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies
Computer Science