Outage-Based Throughput in Wireless Packet Networks

With the increased competition for the electromagnetic spectrum, it is important to characterize the impact of interference in the performance of a wireless packet network, which is traditionally measured by its throughput. This paper presents a unifying framework for characterizing the throughput in wireless packet networks. We analyze the throughput from an outage perspective, in which a packet is successfully received if the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) exceeds some threshold, considering the aggregate interference generated by all emitting nodes in the network. Our work generalizes and unifies various throughput results scattered throughout the literature. Furthermore, the proposed framework encompasses all types of wireless propagation effects (e.g, Nakagami-m fading, Rician fading, and log-normal shadowing), as well as traffic patterns (e.g., slotted-synchronous, slotted-asynchronous, and exponential-interarrivals traffic).