The Local Delay in Poisson Networks

Communication between two neighboring nodes is a very basic operation in wireless networks. Yet very little research has focused on the local delay in networks with randomly placed nodes, defined as the mean time it takes a node to connect to its nearest neighbor. We study this problem for Poisson networks, first considering interference only, then noise only, and finally and briefly, interference plus noise. In the noiseless case, we analyze four different types of nearest-neighbor communication and compare the extreme cases of high mobility, where a new Poisson process is drawn in each time slot, and no mobility, where only a single realization exists and nodes stay put forever. It turns out that the local delay behaves rather differently in the two cases. We also provide the low- and high-rate asymptotic behavior of the minimum achievable delay in each case. In the cases with noise, power control is essential to keep the delay finite, and randomized power control can drastically reduce the required (mean) power for finite local delay.