  In many wireless systems, interference is the main performance-limiting
factor, and is primarily dictated by the locations of concurrent transmitters.
In many earlier works, the locations of the transmitters is often modeled as a
Poisson point process for analytical tractability. While analytically
convenient, the PPP only accurately models networks whose nodes are placed
independently and use ALOHA as the channel access protocol, which preserves the
independence. Correlations between transmitter locations in non-Poisson
networks, which model intelligent access protocols, makes the outage analysis
extremely difficult. In this paper, we take an alternative approach and focus
on an asymptotic regime where the density of interferers $\eta$ goes to 0. We
prove for general node distributions and fading statistics that the success
probability $\p \sim 1-\gamma \eta^{\kappa}$ for $\eta \rightarrow 0$, and
provide values of $\gamma$ and $\kappa$ for a number of important special
cases. We show that $\kappa$ is lower bounded by 1 and upper bounded by a value
that depends on the path loss exponent and the fading. This new analytical
framework is then used to characterize the transmission capacity of a very
general class of networks, defined as the maximum spatial density of active
links given an outage constraint.
