On optimising the capacity and power efficiency of a wireless network

Abstract

With wireless networking becoming more prevalent, the capacity and power efficiency of these networks is of concern to both users and network designers. Wireless network capacity is difficult to define, with current research providing upper bounds and throughput results for given traffic profiles. However, these measures are not suitable as optimisation metrics. This paper first outlines a novel method to measure the average capacity metric of a network. Then we compare the optimisation of power efficiency to that of average capacity and investigate the effect each metric has on the other. Finally, a new approach to network optimisation is presented in the form of a multi-objective cross entropy optimisation. This optimisation simultaneously improves the capacity and power efficiency of the networks indicating that superior solutions can be found when considering the power and capacity problem in unison. When conducting the aforementioned optimisations, the impact that the insertion of additional nodes has upon the metrics is also investigated. The current literature suggests that the additional nodes would reduce the network capacity. Our results, however, show that this is not the case when appropriate transmission powers are utilised in conjunction with the node addition.