Performance of wireless networks is limited by the resources available in the network. The fundamental physical resources used by wireless networks are bandwidth and energy. Designing wireless networks is mainly a question of utilizing these resources in the most efficient way possible. This research considers the two resources separately and defines the bandwidth limited regime and the energy limited regime by focusing on one resource at a time. In each regime, the investigators propose to concentrate on a few measures of performance related to the Shannon capacity, find bounds for these measures, and design practical codes to approach these bounds. Treating the two resources separately makes it possible in many cases to obtain concise, exact capacity results rather than numerical upper and lower bounds. Specifically, this research aims to 1) find fundamental bounds for performance of resource-limited wireless networks, 2) develop a new concept of deterministic capacity of networks, 3) use obtained information-theoretic results directly in guiding practical code designs, 4) employ source-channel coding in code designs, and 5) extend the source-channel coding approach to networks with correlated sources.
