  This paper develops a novel analytical framework for asynchronous wireless
networks deploying multicarrier transmission. Nodes in the network have
different notions of timing, so from the viewpoint of a typical receiver, the
received signals from different transmitters are asynchronous, leading to a
loss of orthogonality between subcarriers. We first develop a detailed
link-level analysis based on OFDM, based on which we propose a tractable
system-level signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) model for
asynchronous OFDM networks. The proposed model is used to analytically
characterize several important statistics in asynchronous networks with
spatially distributed transmitters, including (i) the number of decodable
transmitters, (ii) the decoding probability of the nearest transmitter, and
(iii) the system throughput. The system-level loss from lack of synchronization
is quantified, and to mitigate the loss, we compare and discuss four possible
solutions including extended cyclic prefix, advanced receiver timing, dynamic
receiver timing positioning, and semi-static receiver timing positioning with
multiple timing hypotheses. The model and results are general, and apply to ad
hoc networks, cellular systems, and neighbor discovery in device-to-device
(D2D) networks.
