On the Rate Region of CSMA/CA WLANs

We characterize the (nonconvex) rate region and its maximal convex subsets for carrier-sense multiple-access with collision-avoidance (CSMA/CA) wireless local-area networks (WLANs), and in particular for 802.11 WLANs. In addition to being of intrinsic interest as fundamental properties of CSMA/CA WLANs, this characterization can be exploited to allow the wealth of convex optimization approaches to be applied to CSMA/CA WLANs, especially to utility fair resource allocation problems.