The Capacity of Wireless CSMA/CA Networks

Due to a poor understanding of the interactions among transmitters, wireless multihop networks have commonly been stigmatized as unpredictable in nature. Even elementary questions regarding the throughput limitations of these networks cannot be answered in general. In this paper we investigate the behavior of wireless multihop networks using carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA). Our goal is to understand how the transmissions of a particular node affect the medium access, and ultimately the throughput, of other nodes in the network. We introduce a theory which accurately models the behavior of these networks and show that, contrary to popular belief, their performance is easily predictable and can be described by a system of equations. Using the proposed theory, we provide the analytical expressions necessary to fully characterize the capacity region of any wireless CSMA/CA multihop network. We show that this region is nonconvex in general and entirely agnostic to the probability distributions of all network parameters, depending only on their expected values. Our theory is also shown to extend naturally to time division multiple access (TDMA) networks and to predict how the network responds to unfeasible input rates.