Gaussian Approximations for Carrier Sense Modeling in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Physical carrier sense for wireless multihop networks has attracted a certain degree of attention since it is a simple yet important mechanism for distributed channel access. Some work has modelled interference as a Gaussian process, but in this paper we show that for IEEE 802.11 this assumption is not accurate. We propose an alternative analytical model for the optimization of the carrier sense threshold for these networks that correctly predicts the best threshold value.