2017/05/25 by Felipe Gómez-Cuba, Elza Erkip, Gómez-Cuba, Felipe +5
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced MIMO Systems Optimization #Cooperative Communication and Network Coding #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Theory (cs.IT) #Millimeter-Wave Propagation and Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1705.09373
openalex publication_date 2017/05/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The availability of very wide spectrum in millimeter wave bands combined with\nlarge antenna arrays and ultra dense networks raises two basic questions: What\nis the true value of overly abundant degrees of freedom and how can networks be\ndesigned to fully exploit them? This paper determines the capacity scaling of\nlarge cellular networks as a function of bandwidth, area, number of antennas\nand base station density. It is found that the network capacity has a\nfundamental bandwidth scaling limit, beyond which the network becomes\npower-limited. An infrastructure multi-hop protocol achieves the optimal\nnetwork capacity scaling for all network parameters. In contrast, current\nprotocols that use only single-hop direct transmissions can not achieve the\ncapacity scaling in wideband regimes except in the special case when the\ndensity of base stations is taken to impractical extremes. This finding\nsuggests that multi-hop communication will be important to fully realize the\npotential of next-generation cellular networks. Dedicated relays, if\nsufficiently dense, can also perform this task, relieving user nodes from the\nbattery drain of cooperation. On the other hand, more sophisticated strategies\nsuch as hierarchical cooperation, that are essential for achieving capacity\nscaling in ad hoc networks, are unnecessary in the cellular context.\n