The Influence of Error Propagation on the Capacity of Wireless Networks

In this paper, it is shown that the achievable throughput capacity of wireless networks suffers from a fundamental limitation under finite node resource constraints. It is shown that this reduction results from a fundamental lower bound on the error performance of the wireless-channel model. In particular, the problem is addressed for the classic parallel-unicast problem introduced by Gupta-Kumar (2000). The gap between achievability and the upper bound did not figure in past work on this problem, mainly due to transmission models that implicitly assume wireless nodes to have unlimited storage and encoding/decoding capabilities.