Paper detail

Gaussian Approximation for the Wireless Multi-access Interference Distribution and Its Applications

This paper investigates the problem of Gaussian approximation for the wireless multi-access interference distribution in large spatial wireless networks. First, a principled methodology is presented to establish rates of convergence of the multi-access interference distribution to a Gaussian distribution for general bounded and power-law decaying path-loss functions. The model is general enough to also include various random wireless channel dynamics such as fading and shadowing arising from multipath propagation and obstacles existing in the communication environment. It is shown that the wireless multi-access interference distribution converges to the Gaussian distribution with the same mean and variance at a rate $\frac{1}{\sqrtλ}$, where $λ>0$ is a parameter controlling the intensity of the planar (possibly non-stationary) Poisson point process generating node locations. An explicit expression for the scaling coefficient is obtained as a function of fading statistics and the path-loss function. Second, an extensive numerical and simulation study is performed to illustrate the accuracy of the derived Gaussian approximation bounds. A good statistical fit between the interference distribution and its Gaussian approximation is observed for moderate to high values of $λ$. Finally, applications of these approximation results to upper and lower bound the outage capacity and ergodic sum capacity for spatial wireless networks are illustrated. The derived performance bounds on these capacity metrics track the network performance within one nats per second per hertz.