On The Capacity Scalability Of Line Networks With Buffer Size Constraints

The communication capacity of a network of line topology is studied, where only two adjacent nodes are connected by communication channels, and the intermediate network nodes have a buffer size constraint. Let L be the number of hops from the source node to the destination node. For general channels, we provide schemes to achieve Omega(1/ ln L) rates using a buffer of size B-1 + B-2 bits, where B-1 does not change with L and B-2 = O(ln ln L). In particular, B-1 bits of the buffer are used to store the data generated from the communication messages, and the other B-2 bits of the buffer are used to store the status of counters with the maximum value O(ln L).