Interference and Outage in Clustered Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

In the analysis of large random wireless networks, the underlying node distribution is almost ubiquitously assumed to be the homogeneous Poisson point process. In this paper, the node locations are assumed to form a Poisson cluster process on the plane. We derive the distributional properties of the interference and provide upper and lower bounds for its distribution. We consider the probability of successful transmission in an interference-limited channel when fading is modeled as Rayleigh. We provide a numerically integrable expression for the outage probability and closed-form upper and lower bounds. We show that when the transmitter-receiver distance is large, the success probability is greater than that of a Poisson arrangement. These results characterize the performance of the system under geographical or MAC-induced clustering. We obtain the maximum intensity of transmitting nodes for a given outage constraint, i.e., the transmission capacity (of this spatial arrangement) and show that it is equal to that of a Poisson arrangement of nodes. For the analysis, techniques from stochastic geometry are used, in particular the probability generating functional of Poisson cluster processes, the Palm characterization of Poisson cluster processes, and the Campbell-Mecke theorem.