A General Method to Determine Asymptotic Capacity Upper Bounds for Wireless Networks

Capacity scaling laws offer fundamental understanding on the trend of user throughput behavior when the network size increases. Since the seminal work of Gupta and Kumar, there have been active research efforts in developing capacity scaling laws for ad hoc networks under various advanced physical (PHY) layer technologies. These efforts led to many custom-designed solutions, most of which were mathematically challenging and lacked general properties that can be extended to address scaling laws of ad hoc networks with other PHY layer technologies. So a question is: can we have a general methodology to obtain asymptotic capacity results for various PHY layer technologies? In this paper, we present a simple yet powerful method to determine capacity upper bounds under the protocol model. We prove the correctness of our proposed method and demonstrate its applications to various PHY layer technologies, including directional antenna, MIMO, multi-channel multi-radio, cognitive radio, multiple packet reception, and full-duplex radio. This new method offers a simple tool to researchers to quickly determine asymptotic capacity of wireless networks with a particular PHY layer technology without the need to resort to complex custom-designed analysis as done in the literature.