A throughput scaling law for a class of wireless relay networks

In this paper we study coherent relaying in multi-antenna ad-hoc wireless networks. We suggest a one-hop relaying scheme suitable for multi-antenna relays; we demonstrate the value of employing multi-antenna transceivers in such coherent networks by deriving a scaling law that explicitly accounts for the same. We show that the throughput of such a network under the one-hop relaying protocol scales as R = /spl Phi/(L/spl radic/N), where N is the number of nodes in the network and L is the number of antennas at each node. We also study and quantify the effect of imperfect channel state information (CSI) on the throughput of such coherent networks that depend centrally on the availability of CSI.