  A network of n communication links, operating over a shared wireless channel,
is considered. Fading is assumed to be the dominant factor affecting the
strength of the channels between transmitter and receiver terminals. It is
assumed that each link can be active and transmit with a constant power P or
remain silent. The objective is to maximize the throughput over the selection
of active links. By deriving an upper bound and a lower bound, it is shown that
in the case of Rayleigh fading (i) the maximum throughput scales like $\log n$
(ii) the maximum throughput is achievable in a distributed fashion. The upper
bound is obtained using probabilistic methods, where the key point is to upper
bound the throughput of any random set of active links by a chi-squared random
variable. To obtain the lower bound, a decentralized link activation strategy
is proposed and analyzed.
