Information Theoretic Bounds on the Capacity of Peer-to-Peer Wireless Networks with Hop-by-Hop Routing

Considered is a network of N nodes which wirelessly communicate among themselves in peer-to-peer fashion. For such a network, we apply well known information-theoretic concepts, but applied to switching networks (rather than to physical links), to find an easily computed upper bound on the rate at which information may be carried for any number of nodes, any internodal connectivity pattern, and any hop-by- hop routing algorithm. Found is the maximum factor by which a given traffic matrix, corresponding the relative exogenous demand among each pair of nodes, may be scaled, subject to constraints that (1) each node transmits to only one intended receiver at a time, (2) each node receives from only one transmitter at a time, and (3) no node can transmit and receive simultaneously. Sample results are presented.