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In Sections 8 and 9 we have studied the transport capacity of wireless networks from an information theoretic point of view, addressing the fundamental scaling behavior of wireless networks, and attempting to elucidate the order optimal architectures.

However, a very important issue in practical wireless networks, and unmodeled in these sections, is the presence of fading [22]. Fading is caused by the fact that wireless signals, in the form of electromagnetic waves, travel to a receiver along different paths because of scattering, shadowing, reflections, etc.,[22, 5]. A fundamental question therefore is: How does fading influence the performance of wireless networks? This is the question addressed in this section.