A Unifying Framework for Local Throughput in Wireless Networks

With the increased competition for the electromagnetic spectrum, it is important to characterize the impact of interference in the performance of a wireless network, which is traditionally measured by its throughput. This paper presents a unifying framework for characterizing the local throughput in wireless networks. We first analyze the throughput of a probe link from a connectivity perspective, in which a packet is successfully received if it does not collide with other packets from nodes within its reach (called the audible interferers). We then characterize the throughput from a signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) perspective, in which a packet is successfully received if the SINR exceeds some threshold, considering the interference from all emitting nodes in the network. Our main contribution is to generalize and unify various results scattered throughout the literature. In particular, the proposed framework encompasses arbitrary wireless propagation effects (e.g, Nakagami-m fading, Rician fading, or log-normal shadowing), as well as arbitrary traffic patterns (e.g., slotted-synchronous, slotted-asynchronous, or exponential-interarrivals traffic), allowing us to draw more general conclusions about network performance than previously available in the literature.Comment: Submitted for journal publicatio

Wireless Network Stability in the SINR Model

We study the stability of wireless networks under stochastic arrival processes of packets, and design efficient, distributed algorithms that achieve stability in the SINR (Signal to Interference and Noise Ratio) interference model. Specifically, we make the following contributions. We give a distributed algorithm that achieves $\Omega(\frac{1}{\log^2 n})$-efficiency on all networks (where $n$ is the number of links in the network), for all length monotone, sub-linear power assignments. For the power control version of the problem, we give a distributed algorithm with $\Omega(\frac{1}{\log n(\log n + \log \log \Delta)})$-efficiency (where $\Delta$ is the length diversity of the link set).Comment: 10 pages, appeared in SIROCCO'1

The Balanced Unicast and Multicast Capacity Regions of Large Wireless Networks

We consider the question of determining the scaling of the $n^2$-dimensional balanced unicast and the $n 2^n$-dimensional balanced multicast capacity regions of a wireless network with $n$ nodes placed uniformly at random in a square region of area $n$ and communicating over Gaussian fading channels. We identify this scaling of both the balanced unicast and multicast capacity regions in terms of $\Theta(n)$, out of $2^n$ total possible, cuts. These cuts only depend on the geometry of the locations of the source nodes and their destination nodes and the traffic demands between them, and thus can be readily evaluated. Our results are constructive and provide optimal (in the scaling sense) communication schemes.Comment: 37 pages, 7 figures, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Collision Helps - Algebraic Collision Recovery for Wireless Erasure Networks

Current medium access control mechanisms are based on collision avoidance and collided packets are discarded. The recent work on ZigZag decoding departs from this approach by recovering the original packets from multiple collisions. In this paper, we present an algebraic representation of collisions which allows us to view each collision as a linear combination of the original packets. The transmitted, colliding packets may themselves be a coded version of the original packets. We propose a new acknowledgment (ACK) mechanism for collisions based on the idea that if a set of packets collide, the receiver can afford to ACK exactly one of them and still decode all the packets eventually. We analytically compare delay and throughput performance of such collision recovery schemes with other collision avoidance approaches in the context of a single hop wireless erasure network. In the multiple receiver case, the broadcast constraint calls for combining collision recovery methods with network coding across packets at the sender. From the delay perspective, our scheme, without any coordination, outperforms not only a ALOHA-type random access mechanisms, but also centralized scheduling. For the case of streaming arrivals, we propose a priority-based ACK mechanism and show that its stability region coincides with the cut-set bound of the packet erasure network