Stochastic Geometry and Wireless Networks

A wireless communication network can be viewed as a collection of nodes, located in some domain, which can in turn be transmitters or receivers (depending on the network considered, nodes may be mobile users, base stations in a cellular network, access points of a WiFi mesh etc.). At a given time, several nodes transmit simultaneously, each toward its own receiver. Each transmitter–receiver pair requires its own wireless link. The signal received from the link transmitter may be jammed by the signals received from the other transmitters. Even in the simplest model where the signal power radiated from a point decays in an isotropic way with Euclidean distance, the geometry of the locations of the nodes plays a key role since it determines the signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR) at each receiver and hence the possibility of establishing simultaneously this collection of links at a given bit rate. The interference seen by a receiver is the sum of the signal powers received from all transmitters, except its own transmitter.