Energy-based interference analysis of heterogeneous packet radio networks

While the use of radio technology for wireless data communications has increased rapidly, the wide variety of radio interfaces being used has made interference investigations hard to perform. With that in mind, we present a novel approach for analyzing packet radio communications, applicable to interfering heterogeneous networks, which leads to tractable analytical expressions. The core of the approach is an analytical framework modeling each network with individual properties for the packet types and the channel sets used, while taking path loss between all network nodes into account. Furthermore, we present a derivation of closed-form expressions for the throughput of the networks, thus allowing for the investigation of important mechanisms limiting network and system performance. The expressions enable fast and flexible analysis to be performed without extensive computer simulations or measurement campaigns. To illustrate the use of the framework and the strength of the closed-form expressions, we analyze a heterogeneous example system consisting of one IEEE 802.11b network and multiple Bluetooth networks that use multiple packet types. In the analysis, we also take the adjacent channel interference into account when calculating network throughput as functions of the number of interferers in the system.