Dynamic Adaptation in Wireless Networks Under Comprehensive Interference via Carrier Sense

Dynamic behavior is an essential part of wireless networking, due mobility, environmental changes or failures. We analyze a natural exponential backoff procedure to manage contention in a fading channel, in the presence of both node churn and link changes. We show that it attains a fast convergence, stabilizing contention from any state in logarithmic time. We use it to obtain optimal algorithm for Local Broadcast that even improves known results for the static case. The results illustrate the utility of carrier sensing, a stock feature of wireless nodes.