In wireless peer-to-peer networks that serve various proximity-based
applications, peer discovery is the key to identifying other peers with which a
peer can communicate and an understanding of its performance is fundamental to
the design of an efficient discovery operation. This paper analyzes the
performance of wireless peer discovery through comprehensively considering the
wireless channel, spatial distribution of peers, and discovery operation
parameters. The average numbers of successfully discovered peers are expressed
in closed forms for two widely used channel models, i.e., the interference
limited Nakagami-m fading model and the Rayleigh fading model with nonzero
noise, when peers are spatially distributed according to a homogeneous Poisson
point process. These insightful expressions lead to the design principles for
the key operation parameters including the transmission probability, required
amount of wireless resources, level of modulation and coding scheme (MCS), and
transmit power. Furthermore, the impact of shadowing on the spatial performance
and suggested design principles is evaluated using mathematical analysis and
simulations.Comment: 12 pages (double columns), 10 figures, 1 table, to appear in the IEEE
Transactions on Wireless Communication
