Transport Capacity for Wireless Networks with Multi-User Links

The distance-weighted rate achievable in wireless networks that utilize multiple antennas and multi-user links is analyzed. The transport capacities of vector multiple-access and broadcast channels are given; these network topologies are used at the physical layer of an ad-hoc network to obtain achievable distance-weighted rate regions for a multiple-antenna wireless network. These regions are obtained by considering interfering multiple-access and broadcast channels in all possible link configurations. Multi-hop routing is shown to increase the capacity regions significantly. A centralized technique for link activation which results in networks with throughput close to capacity is developed. We give an analytic upper bound on the capacity and show that in networks with an asymptotically large number of nodes, the throughput grows with the number of antennas, as well as with the expected path loss between nodes. Numerical examples agree with the analysis and show the benefit of interfering multiple-access links over interfering broadcast or point-to-point links for a uniform per-node power constraint.