The guard zone in wireless ad hoc networks

In ad hoc networks, it may be helpful to suppress transmissions by nodes around the desired receiver in order to increase the likelihood of successful communication. This paper introduces the concept of a guard zone, defined as the region around each receiver where interfering transmissions are inhibited. Using stochastic geometry, the guard zone size that maximizes the transmission capacity for spread spectrum ad hoc networks is derived - narrowband transmission (spreading gain of unity) is a special case. A large guard zone naturally decreases the interference, but at the cost of inefficient spatial reuse. The derived results provide insight into the design of contention resolution algorithms by quantifying the optimal tradeoff between interference and spatial reuse in terms of the system parameters. A capacity increase relative to random access (ALOHA) in the range of 2 - 100 fold is demonstrated through an optimal guard zone; the capacity increase depending primarily on the required outage probability, as higher required QoS increasingly rewards scheduling. Compared to the ubiquitous carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) - which essentially implements a guard zone around the transmitter rather than the receiver - we observe a capacity increase on the order of 30 - 100%.