Impact of interference on nodal communication range in wireless ad hoc networks

In a distributed control wireless ad hoc network, multi-user interference plays a significant role in determining one-to-one communication throughput performance of the network. Although the effects of exposed/hidden terminals on the network throughput in a single-channel wireless ad hoc network have been extensively studied, the interference power computation at the receiver and its effect on the acceptable communication range has not been analyzed in the literature. In this paper, via probabilistic analysis we capture the total interference power that a receiver node experiences. We then demonstrate the impact of interference power on the effective communication range of the nodes. Our analytic results are validated by C-based network simulation. The observations in this paper can be used in deciding interference-aware multi-hop forwarding strategies in wireless ad hoc networks.