Managing Interference Correlation Through Random Medium Access

The capacity of wireless networks is fundamentally limited by interference. However, little research has focused on the interference correlation, which may greatly increase the local delay (namely the number of time slots required for a node to successfully transmit a packet). This paper focuses on the question whether increasing randomness in the MAC, specifically frequency-hopping multiple access (FHMA) and ALOHA, helps to reduce the effect of interference correlation. We derive closed-form results for the mean and variance of the local delay for the two MAC protocols and evaluate the optimal parameters that minimize the mean local delay. Based on the optimal parameters, we identify two operating regimes, the correlation-limited regime and the bandwidth-limited regime. Our results reveal that while the mean local delays for FHMA with N sub-bands and for ALOHA with transmit probability p essentially coincide when p=1/N, a fundamental discrepancy exists between their variances. We also discuss implications from the analysis, including an interesting mean delay-jitter tradeoff, and convenient bounds on the tail probability of the local delay, which shed useful insights into system design.