On Maximizing Capacity in Fixed Mesh Networks with MIMO Links

On Maximizing Capacity in Fixed Mesh Networks with MIMO Links Stephan Bohacek Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Delaware [email protected] Abstract: Multiple antennas can dramatically improve the performance communication. It is a design choice as to how the antennas are used and how they improve performance. For example, by transmitting different data over the different antennas, the bit-rate can be increased. On the other hand, the same data can be transmitted over the antennas but the antennas can be used to mitigate interference, i.e., beamforming. Due to the added capabilities of multi-antenna links, capacity maximization is potentially considerable more complicated when links have multiple antennas. This chapter shows that in general, MIMO links greatly increase the computational complexity of capacity maximization, however, in the high SNR setting that is typical of infrastructure mesh networks, capacity maximization can be achieved without any additional computational complexity.