i Preface 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. Stochastic geometry provides a natural way of defining and computing macroscopic properties of such networks, by averaging over all potential geometrical patterns for the nodes, in the same way as queuing theory provides response times or congestion, averaged over all potential arrival patterns within a given parametric class.

Consider a generic data unit of random size L that needs to be transmitted over a channel of unit capacity. The channel availability dynamics is modeled as an i.i.d. sequence {A, Ai}i�1 that is independent of L. During each period of time that the channel becomes available, say Ai, we attempt to transmit the data unit. If L ≤ Ai, the transmission is considered successful; otherwise, we wait for the next available period Ai+1 and attempt to retransmit the data from the beginning. We investigate the asymptotic properties of the number of retransmissions N and the total transmission time T until the data is successfully transmitted. In the context of studying the completion times in systems with failures where jobs restart from the beginning, it was first recognized in [5, 18] that this model results in power law and, in general, heavy-tailed delays. The main objective of this paper is to uncover the detailed structure of this class of heavy-tailed distributions induced by retransmissions. More precisely, we study how the functional dependence (P[L> x]) −1 ≈ Φ((P[A> x]) −1) impacts the distributions of N and T; the approximation ≈ will be appropriately defined

Abstract—It has been recently discovered that heavy-tailed file completion time can result from protocol interaction even when file sizes are light-tailed. A key to this phenomenon is the RESTART feature where if a file transfer is interrupted before it is completed, the transfer needs to restart from the beginning. In this paper, we show that independent or bounded fragmentation produces light-tailed file completion time as long as the file size is light-tailed, i.e., in this case, heavy-tailed file completion time can only originate from heavy-tailed file sizes. If the file size is heavy-tailed, then the file completion time is clearly heavy-tailed. For this case, we show that when the file size distribution is regularly varying, then under independent or bounded fragmentation, the completion time tail distribution function is asymptotically upper bounded by that of the original file size stretched by a constant factor. We then prove that if the

Abstract: We study a slotted version of the Aloha Medium Access (MAC) protocol in a Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET). Our model features transmitters randomly located in the Euclidean plane, according to a Poisson point process and a set of receivers representing the next-hop from every transmitter. We concentrate on the so-called outage scenario, where a successful transmission requires a Signal-to-Interference-and-Noise (SINR) larger than some threshold. We analyze the local delays in such a network, namely the number of times slots required for nodes to transmit a packet to their prescribed next-hop receivers. The analysis depends very much on the receiver scenario and on the variability of the fading. In most cases, each node has finitemean geometric random delay and thus a positive next hop throughput. However, the spatial (or large population) averaging of these individual finite mean-delays leads to infinite values in several practical cases, including the Rayleigh fading and positive thermal noise case. In some cases it exhibits an interesting phase transition phenomenon where the spatial average is finite when certain model parameters (receiver distance, thermal noise, Aloha medium access probability) are below a threshold and infinite above. To the best of our knowledge, this phenomenon, which we propose to call the wireless contention phase transition, has not been discussed in the literature. We comment on the relationships between the above facts and the heavy tails found in the so-called “RESTART ” algorithm. We argue that the spatial average of the mean local delays is infinite primarily because of the outage logic, where one transmits full packets at time slots when the receiver is covered at the required SINR and where one wastes all the other time slots. This results in the “RESTART ” mechanism, which in turn explains why we have infinite spatial average. Adaptive coding offers another nice way of breaking the outage/RESTART logic. We show examples where the average delays are finite in the adaptive coding case, whereas they are infinite in the outage case. Index Terms—mobile ad-hoc network, slotted Aloha, transmission

Abstract: We study a slotted version of the Aloha Medium Access (MAC) protocol in a Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET). Our model features transmitters randomly located in the Euclidean plane, according to a Poisson point process and a set of receivers representing the next-hop from every transmitter. We concentrate on the so-called outage scenario, where a successful transmission requires a Signal-to-Interference-and-Noise (SINR) larger than some threshold. We analyze the local delays in such a network, namely the number of times slots required for nodes to transmit a packet to their prescribed next-hop receivers. The analysis depends very much on the receiver scenario and on the variability of the fading. In most cases, each node has finitemean geometric random delay and thus a positive next hop throughput. However, the spatial (or large population) averaging of these individual finite mean-delays leads to infinite values in several practical cases, including the Rayleigh fading and positive thermal noise case. In some cases it exhibits an interesting phase transition phenomenon where the spatial average is finite when certain model parameters (receiver distance, thermal noise, Aloha medium access probability) are below a threshold and infinite above. To the best of our knowledge, this phenomenon, which we propose to call the wireless contention phase transition, has not been discussed in the literature. We comment on the relationships between the above facts and the heavy tails found in the so-called “RESTART ” algorithm. We argue that the spatial average of the mean local delays is infinite primarily because of the outage logic, where one transmits full packets at time slots when the receiver is covered at the required SINR and where one wastes all the other time slots. This results in the “RESTART ” mechanism, which in turn explains why we have infinite spatial average. Adaptive coding offers another nice way of breaking the outage/RESTART logic. We show examples where the average delays are finite in the adaptive coding case, whereas they are infinite in the outage case. Index Terms—mobile ad-hoc network, slotted Aloha, transmission

It has been recently discovered that on an unreliable server, the job completion time distribution function (df) can be heavy-tailed (HT) even when job size df is light-tailed (LT) [1, 5]. 1 A key to this phenomenon is the RESTART feature