Mat\'ern hard core processes of types I and II are the point processes of
choice to model concurrent transmitters in CSMA networks. We determine the mean
interference observed at a node of the process and compare it with the mean
interference in a Poisson point process of the same density. It turns out that
despite the similarity of the two models, they behave rather differently. For
type I, the excess interference (relative to the Poisson case) increases
exponentially in the hard-core distance, while for type II, the gap never
exceeds 1 dB.

Outage probabilities in wireless networks depend on various factors: the node
distribution, the MAC scheme, and the models for path loss, fading and
transmission success. In prior work on outage characterization for networks
with randomly placed nodes, most of the emphasis was put on networks whose
nodes are Poisson distributed and where ALOHA is used as the MAC protocol. In
this paper we provide a general framework for the analysis of outage
probabilities in the high-reliability regime.

We develop a new metric for quantifying end-to-end throughput in multihop
wireless networks, which we term random access transport capacity, since the
interference model presumes uncoordinated transmissions. The metric quantifies
the average maximum rate of successful end-to-end transmissions, multiplied by
the communication distance, and normalized by the network area.