We optimize the hierarchical cooperation protocol of Ozgur, Leveque and Tse,
which is supposed to yield almost linear scaling of the capacity of a dense
wireless network with the number of users n. Exploiting recent results on the
optimality of "treating interference as noise" in Gaussian interference
channels, we are able to optimize the achievable average per-link rate and not
just its scaling law. Our optimized hierarchical cooperation protocol
significantly outperforms the originally proposed scheme. On the negative side,
we show that even for very large n, the rate scaling is far from linear, and
the optimal number of stages t is less than 4, instead of tββ as required for almost linear scaling. Combining our results and the
fact that, beyond a certain user density, the network capacity is fundamentally
limited by Maxwell laws, as shown by Francheschetti, Migliore and Minero, we
argue that there is indeed no intermediate regime of linear scaling for dense
networks in practice.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures, ISIT 2014. arXiv admin note: substantial text
overlap with arXiv:1402.181