Information Transmission Bounds in Mobile Communication Networks

Networks of autonomous agents are becoming ubiquitous, motivating the challenging task of developing control policies for communication across these networks. The aim is usually to maximize the data transmission rate, or to reliably transfer a minimum amount of data subject to network constraints. For a stationary transmitter-receiver pair under an average transmit power constraint, the total amount of data that can be transmitted is unbounded as transmission time tends to infinity. We show that, in contrast, if the transmitter is moving at a constant speed, then the maximum amount of data that can be transmitted is bounded. This bound is of particular relevance to networks of aerial vehicles, where distances may quickly grow large and channel gain is dominated by path loss dynamics.