1On the Achievable Throughput of CSMA under Imperfect Carrier Sensing

Abstract—Recently, it has been shown that a simple, dis-tributed CSMA algorithm is throughput-optimal. However, throughput-optimality is established under the perfect or ideal carrier sensing assumption, i.e., each link can precisely sense the presence of other active links in its neighborhood. In contrast, we investigate achievable throughput of the CSMA algorithm under imperfect carrier sensing. Through the analysis on both false positive and negative carrier sensing failures, we show that CSMA can achieve an arbitrary fraction of the capacity region if certain access probabilities are set appropriately. To establish this result, we use the perturbation theory of Markov chains. I