Digital Channel Capacity Calculation Using Augmented Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams

Digital channel capacity of a network is an important factor in network design. Recent solutions use the Markov chain to model and compute the capacity of only a specific wireless network with multiple relays and multiple hops (MR-MH), and thus cannot be used for networks in general. Further, the solutions assume that all communication link failure probabilities are equal and that state transitional probabilities are known. This paper proposes a general solution for computing the capacity. Our solution first converts the problem of computing the channel capacity of such networks into a network reliability problem. Then, it applies the Augmented Ordered Binary Decision Diagram (OBDD-A) method to compute the reliability, and hence the channel capacity. The OBDD-A does not require the aforementioned assumptions, and can be applied to a wide range of networks. Since the OBDD-A has been shown to have linear time complexity and constant space complexity for families of networks with constant inter-connectivity (such as MR-MH) the proposed solution is extremely efficient. The application of our method is verified by simulations.