Uniqueness of Stationary Distributions in Random Access Poisson Networks

This letter presents sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of the limiting stationary distribution in random access Poisson networks with packet queueing and under Rayleigh fading and a general path loss model. This system model is traditionally used in the literature assuming uniqueness of the stationary distribution. We demonstrate here through a counterexample that this assumption might not always hold. From the sufficient conditions, an interesting and perhaps counterintuitive result emerged, that is, the arrival rate of packets per node greater than 1/e guarantees uniqueness of the limiting distribution. When that is the case, then setting the medium access probability to 1 minimizes the proportion of unstable nodes.