Distance-Weighted Throughput for Multi-Antenna Wireless Networks with Multi-User Links

Recent results on the throughput achievable with wireless networks have not fully considered multiple antennas and multi-user links. We introduce these topics by giving the transport capacity of the multiple-antenna multiple-access and broadcast channels. We use these topologies at the physical layer of an ad-hoc network to obtain achievable distance-weighted rates for a multi-antenna wireless network. These values are obtained by maximizing the distance-weighted rate over all combinations of point-to-point, uplink, and downlink topologies, respectively. A distributed algorithm which seeks a Nash equilibrium is used to optimize the transmit covariance matrices for the centralized topology search. Numerical examples with a uniform per-node power constraint show the benefit of uplink topologies over downlink and point-to-point topologies, especially at high transmit power, high numbers of antennas, and a large number of nodes