Transmission capacity of wireless ad hoc networks with outage constraints

In this paper, upper and lower bounds on the transmission capacity of spread-spectrum (SS) wireless ad hoc networks are derived. We define transmission capacity as the product of the maximum density of successful transmissions multiplied by their data rate, given an outage constraint. Assuming that the nodes are randomly distributed in space according to a Poisson point process, we derive upper and lower bounds for frequency hopping (FH-CDMA) and direct sequence (DS-CDMA) SS networks, which incorporate traditional modulation types (no spreading) as a special case. These bounds cleanly summarize how ad hoc network capacity is affected by the outage probability, spreading factor, transmission power, target signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and other system parameters. Using these bounds, it can be shown that FH-CDMA obtains a higher transmission capacity than DS-CDMA on the order of M^1-2α/, where M is the spreading factor and α>2 is the path loss exponent. A tangential contribution is an (apparently) novel technique for obtaining tight bounds on tail probabilities of additive functionals of homogeneous Poisson point processes.