The transport capacity of cellular wireless networks

Transport capacity was originally introduced in the study of wireless ad hoc networks as a measure of the distance hauling capacity of a wireless network. In this paper, we develop a general network model to extend the concept of transport capacity to cellular wireless networks. We show that in the case of a p-dimensional regular cellular network, the transport capacity of the network follows the scaling law of Θ(N^p+1/p) bit meters per second. In the planar case where p = 2, our result of Θ(N√N) is substantially different from the scaling law of Θ(N) bit meters per second derived by Xie and Kumar for a regular planar wireless ad hoc network. This result highlights the key role the network topology plays in a network´s transport capacity.