Information Flow Theory in Dense Wireless Networks

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

Abstract: Future wireless networks are composed of a massive number of nodes densely distributed in large geographical areas. Such networks are used in applications such as wide area environmental protection, transportation, automated agriculture, or wireless micro-sensing in civil infrastructure systems. Information generated by distributed sources is transported to the destinations by collaborative efforts of nodes that forward the traffic of each other; therefore, the information is diffused over routes composed of many hops, each contributing to a short range transmission. Careful analysis of the networks with such large number of wireless nodes involves a prohibitive level of complexity. This complexity is due to the uncoordinated interactions between each pair of nodes in the network (e.g., due to interference of simultaneous transmissions); as a result, little is known about the behavior of massively dense wireless networks. The introduced methodology models a dense wireless network by a continuum of nodes. The spatially continuous model of information flow is a very promising methodology to overcome the prohibitive complexity of conventional discrete space methods. The project is expected to produce powerful design and analysis tools for different purposes such as minimizing the number of required wireless nodes for a given spatial distribution of information sources, finding minimum required density of nodes in space, determining the placement of nodes, minimizing the transmit power of nodes, load balancing, etc. The project is an important step towards development of a theory of information flow in dense wireless networks. Such a theory is the wireless networking counterpart of the classical flow theory of other branches of science and engineering such as fluid dynamics, heat exchange, and electrostatics.