EAGER: Collaborative Research: CIF: Exploring the Fundamentals of Multihop Multiflow Wireless Networks

William Marsh Rice University, Houston TX

Investigators

Abstract

While current cellular networks are based essentially on one-to-many and many-to-one single-hop subnets and cope with inter-cell interference by careful centralized resource planning, future wireless networks must consider heterogeneous environments characterized by user-deployed and user-operated infrastructure in which multiple flows and multiple hops will play an increasingly relevant role. Indeed, such networks are expected to open doors to trillions of dollars of e-commerce, while also providing vast amounts of easily accessible knowledge to the public. Developing a fundamental understanding of multihop multiflow wireless networks is therefore critically important at this time. This exploratory project will seek to discover the fundamentals of such networks by obtaining their information theoretic capacity in an approximated sense. It is expected that scalable and extensible solutions are possible for such networks ranging from the seemingly simple ones involving two hops and two flows to apparently more complex ones involving multiple hops and more than two flows with arbitrary connectivity. In so demonstrating, multiple metrics will be employed. These metrics in the increasing order of accuracy in the high signal-to-noise ratio regime are (a) the fundamental limit on the available signaling (temporal/spectral/spatial) dimensions of the network, (b) the fundamental limit on the available signaling and signal-level dimensions, and (c) the capacity to within a (universal) constant number of bits independently of channel parameters.