Throughput and Latency Analysis for Line Networks With Outage Links

Wireless communication links suffer from outage events caused by fading and interference. To facilitate a tractable analysis of network communication throughput and latency, we propose an outage link model to represent a communication link in the slow fading phenomenon. For a line-topology network with outage links, we study three types of intermediate network node schemes: random linear network coding, store-and-forward, and hop-by-hop retransmission. We provide the analytical formulas for the maximum throughputs and the end-to-end latency for each scheme. To gain a more explicit understanding, we perform a scalability analysis of the throughput and latency as the network length increases. We observe that the same order of throughput/latency holds across a wide range of outage functions for each scheme. We illustrate how our exact formulae and scalability results can be applied to compare different schemes.