Modeling and Analysis of Two-Flow Interactions in Wireless Networks

Interference plays a complex and often defining role in the performance of wireless networks, especially in multi-hop scenarios. In the presence of interference, Carrier sense multiple access MAC protocols are known to suffer from the hidden terminal and exposed terminal problems, which can cause poor performance and unfairness. In this paper, we examine the possible interference modes arising among two interfering one-hop connections under a two-disc model of interference. We classify the large set of resulting configurations into five categories and develop closed form expressions to compute their probability of occurrence. The analysis exposes two new categories, whose occurrence is common, and whose behavior differs significantly from the three known interference categories. Further, the frequency of occurrence of the categories differ significantly from existing results (obtained with a simpler unit disc model of interference). We develop throughput estimation models for the different categories and validate them using simulation.