AbstractThe most successful achievable schemes for ad hoc wireless networks are those based on establishing cooperative multiple-input and multiple-output links. In this article, we analyze one of the important design parameters of such schemes, namely the number of quantization bits. Due to the digital architecture of these schemes, the received signal at nodes should become quantized before further processing. The scheme’s aggregate throughput highly depends on the resolution of the quantization process. We demonstrate that there is an optimum number of quantization bits which maximizes the network throughput. We show that the optimum number of quantization bits scales asβlog2(SNR), for any strictly positiveβindependent of SNR, for the high SNR regime. Furthermore, we derive the optimum scaling of network throughput in such a regime. It is concluded that a good management of the number of quantization bits as a design parameter has a significant impact on the network performance.