Interference-Limited versus Noise-Limited Communication Over Dense Wireless Networks

A network of n wireless communication links is considered. Rayleigh fading is assumed to be the dominant factor affecting the strength of the channels between nodes. In previous works it is shown that the maximum throughput of this network over all link activation strategies scales as logn. However, it is achieved by assigning a vanishingly small rate to each active link. The objective of this paper is to analyze the achievable throughput of the network when the data rate of each active link is constrained to be a constant lambda > 0. A link activation strategy is proposed and analyzed using random graph theory. In the interference-limited regime, a throughput scaling as tau log n is achievable, where the scaling factor tau approaches 1 as lambda rarr 0 or lambda rarr infin. This implies the asymptotic optimality of the proposed scheme. In the noise-limited regime, it is shown that rate-per-links scaling as log(Delta₀rho) are achievable, where Delta₀ is a constant and rho is the transmit signal to noise ratio. However, in this case the throughput decreases by a factor of log log n as compared to the interference-limited regime.