  We consider Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) with transmitters located according
to a Poisson point in the Euclidean plane, slotted Aloha Medium Access (MAC)
protocol and 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 finite-mean 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
are below a threshold and infinite above. We call this phenomenon, contention
phase transition. 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 a 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.
