  In a wireless network with a single source and a single destination and an
arbitrary number of relay nodes, what is the maximum rate of information flow
achievable? We make progress on this long standing problem through a two-step
approach. First we propose a deterministic channel model which captures the key
wireless properties of signal strength, broadcast and superposition. We obtain
an exact characterization of the capacity of a network with nodes connected by
such deterministic channels. This result is a natural generalization of the
celebrated max-flow min-cut theorem for wired networks. Second, we use the
insights obtained from the deterministic analysis to design a new
quantize-map-and-forward scheme for Gaussian networks. In this scheme, each
relay quantizes the received signal at the noise level and maps it to a random
Gaussian codeword for forwarding, and the final destination decodes the
source's message based on the received signal. We show that, in contrast to
existing schemes, this scheme can achieve the cut-set upper bound to within a
gap which is independent of the channel parameters. In the case of the relay
channel with a single relay as well as the two-relay Gaussian diamond network,
the gap is 1 bit/s/Hz. Moreover, the scheme is universal in the sense that the
relays need no knowledge of the values of the channel parameters to
(approximately) achieve the rate supportable by the network. We also present
extensions of the results to multicast networks, half-duplex networks and
ergodic networks.
