On the Broadcast Capacity of Large Wireless Networks at Low SNR

The present paper focuses on the problem of broadcasting information in the most efficient manner in a large two-dimensional ad hoc wireless network at low SNR and under line-of-sight propagation. A new communication scheme is proposed, where source nodes first broadcast their data to the entire network, despite the lack of sufficient available power. The signal's power is then reinforced via successive back-and-forth beamforming transmissions between different groups of nodes in the network, so that all nodes are able to decode the transmitted information at the end. This scheme is shown to achieve asymptotically the broadcast capacity of the network, which is expressed in terms of the largest singular value of the matrix of fading coefficients between the nodes in the network. A detailed mathematical analysis is then presented to evaluate the asymptotic behavior of this largest singular value.