A study of connectivity in MIMO fading ad-hoc networks

We investigate the connectivity of fading wireless ad-hoc networks with a pair of novel connectivity metrics. Our first metric looks at the problem of connectivity relying on the outage capacity of MIMO channels. Our second metric relies on a probabilistic treatment of the symbol error rates for such channels. We relate both capacity and symbol error rates to the characteristics of the underlying communication system such as antenna configuration, modulation, coding, and signal strength measured in terms of signal-to-interference-noise-ratio. For each metric of connectivity, we also provide a simplified treatment in the case of ergodic fading channels. In each case, we assume a pair of nodes are connected if their bi-directional measure of connectivity is better than a given threshold. Our analysis relies on the central limit theorem to approximate the distribution of the combined undesired signal affecting each link of an ad-hoc network as Gaussian. Supported by our simulation results, our analysis shows that (1) a measure of connectivity purely based on signal strength is not capable of accurately capturing the connectivity phenomenon, and (2) employing multiple antenna mobile nodes improves the connectivity of fading ad-hoc networks.