Fast Algorithm for Finding Unicast Capacity of Linear Deterministic Wireless Relay Networks

The deterministic channel model for wireless relay networks proposed by Avestimehr, Diggavi and Tse ‘07 has captured the broadcast and inference nature of wireless communications and has been widely used in approximating the capacity of wireless relay networks. The authors generalized the max-flow min-cut theorem to the linear deterministic wireless relay networks and characterized the unicast capacity of such deterministic network as the minimum rank of all the binary adjacency matrices describing source-destination cuts whose number grows exponentially with the size of the network. In this paper, we developed a fast algorithm for finding the unicast capacity of a linear deterministic wireless relay network by finding the maximum number of linearly independent paths using the idea of path augmentation. We developed a modified depth-first search algorithm tailored for the linear deterministic relay networks for finding linearly independent paths whose total number proved to equal the unicast capacity of the underlying network. The result of our algorithm suggests a capacity-achieving transmission strategy with one-bit length linear encoding at the relay nodes in the concerned linear deterministic wireless relay network. The correctness of our algorithm for universal cases is given by our proof in the paper. Moreover, our algorithm has a computational complexity bounded by O(|Vx| ·C4 + d · |Vx| ·C3) which shows a significant improvement over the previous results for solving the same problem by Amaudruz and Fragouli (whose complexity is bounded by O(M · |E| · C) with M ≥ d and |E| ≥ |Vx|) and by Yazdi and Savari (whose complexity is bounded by O(L · M · h30 + L · M · C · h40) with h0 ≥ C).