This paper deals with the delay-throughput analysis of a single-hop wireless
network with n transmitter/receiver pairs. All channels are assumed to be
block Rayleigh fading with shadowing, described by parameters
(α,ϖ), where α denotes the probability of shadowing and
ϖ represents the average cross-link gains. The analysis relies on the
distributed on-off power allocation strategy (i.e., links with a direct channel
gain above a certain threshold transmit at full power and the rest remain
silent) for the deterministic and stochastic packet arrival processes. It is
also assumed that each transmitter has a buffer size of one packet and dropping
occurs once a packet arrives in the buffer while the previous packet has not
been served. In the first part of the paper, we define a new notion of
performance in the network, called effective throughput, which captures the
effect of arrival process in the network throughput, and maximize it for
different cases of packet arrival process. It is proved that the effective
throughput of the network asymptotically scales as α^logn, with α^≜αϖ, regardless of
the packet arrival process. In the second part of the paper, we present the
delay characteristics of the underlying network in terms of the packet dropping
probability. We derive the sufficient conditions in the asymptotic case of n→∞ such that the packet dropping probability tend to zero, while
achieving the maximum effective throughput of the network. Finally, we study
the trade-off between the effective throughput, delay, and packet dropping
probability of the network for different packet arrival processes.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (34 pages