Rethinking MIMO for Wireless Networks: Linear Throughput Increases with Multiple Receive Antennas

The benefit of multiple antenna communication is investigated in wireless ad hoc networks, and the primary finding is that throughput can be made to scale linearly with the number of receive antennas even if each transmitting node uses only a single antenna. The linear throughput gain is achieved by (i) using the receive antennas to cancel the signals of nearby interferers as well as to increase signal power (i.e., for array gain), and (ii) maintaining a constant per-link rate and increasing the spatial density of simultaneous transmissions linearly with the number of antennas at each receiver. Numerical results show that even a few receive antennas provide substantial throughput gains, thereby illustrating that the asymptotic linear scaling result is also indicative of performance for reasonable numbers of antennas.