Near-far effects in land mobile random access networks with narrow-band Rayleigh fading channels

The near-far effect of random access protocols in mobile radio channels with receiver capture is investigated. To this end, the probability of successful reception of a packet from a terminal at a known distance from the central receiver is obtained taking into account Rayleigh fading, UHF propagation attenuation, and the statistics of contending packet traffic in radio nets employing slotted ALOHA, carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) or inhibit sense multiple access (ISMA) protocols. Various models of receiver capture are compared, namely packet error rates for synchronous detection in slow- and fast-fading channels, and the probability that the signal-to-interference ratio is above a required threshold