Stable transmission capacity in Poisson wireless networks with delay guarantees

In this paper, a new measure of outage-constrained network area spectral efficiency, coined as stable transmission capacity, is introduced, which is achievable under finite delay and queue-length stability. Specifically, this framework extends the transmission capacity formulation to scenarios with packet retransmissions and transmitters' queues with independent packet arrivals. This approach is applied to single-hop wireless networks with nodes being spatially distributed as Poisson point process, slotted ALOHA medium access protocol, packet arrivals following a geometrical distribution, and bounded number of retransmissions. The stable transmission capacity is then obtained as the solution of a constrained optimization problem with respect to the probability that a transmitter access the network, the link spectral efficiency, and the maximum number of retransmissions. Using the unconstrained stable transmission capacity as an upper bound, it is shown under which operating points and network parameters such limit can be achieved. Our numerical results also evince how the spatial density and the arrival process affect the network performance.