Delay performance of CSMA policies in multihop wireless networks: A new perspective

In this paper, we study the delay performance of CSMA policies in wireless networks, where the delay is defined as the average time that a silent wireless link needs to wait until it accesses the channel for packet transmission. It is well-known that CSMA policies can incur an access delay that may be correlated over time and may grow exponentially with the network size. This discourages practical implementation of CSMA policies in even mid-sized networks. In this paper, we provide a new perspective on the delay performance of CSMA policies. We present recently developed results for two important interference models and show how CSMA policies can be used to ensure an access delay that is memoryless over time or that does not grow with the network size. The two interference models that we consider are primary interference and the ¿lattice interference graph¿. Our results suggest that CSMA policies can achieve a delay performance, as well as a delay-throughput trade-off, that makes them viable to be used in practice.