Capacity of Cellular Wireless Networks

Abstract

In this paper, a tractable model of cellular wireless networks is considered, where both the basestation (BS) and mobile user (MU) locations are distributed as independent Poisson point processes, and each MU connects to its nearest BS. Each packet from the BS is transmitted using an automatic-repeat-request strategy until the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) is larger than a threshold, and the packet delay is equal to the expected number of retransmissions required for successful reception. We define the network capacity as the product of the BS density and the reciprocal of the packet delay, maximized over all BS strategies. This definition of capacity, while being natural, is non-trivial to analyses because of the temporal correlations of SINRs and arbitrary BS strategies. An exact characterization (non-asymptotic) of this natural capacity metric is derived, which shows that the capacity increases polynomially with the BS density in the low BS density regime and then scales inverse exponentially with the increasing BS density.