With millimeter wave bands emerging as a strong candidate for 5G cellular
networks, next-generation systems may be in a unique position where spectrum is
plentiful. To assess the potential value of this spectrum, this paper derives
scaling laws on the per mobile downlink feasible rate with large bandwidth and
number of nodes, for both Infrastructure Single Hop (ISH) and Infrastructure
Multi-Hop (IMH) architectures. It is shown that, for both cases, there exist
\emph{critical bandwidth scalings} above which increasing the bandwidth no
longer increases the feasible rate per node. These critical thresholds coincide
exactly with the bandwidths where, for each architecture, the network
transitions from being degrees-of-freedom-limited to power-limited. For ISH,
this critical bandwidth threshold is lower than IMH when the number of users
per base station grows with network size. This result suggests that multi-hop
transmissions may be necessary to fully exploit large bandwidth degrees of
freedom in deployments with growing number of users per cell.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure