  The outage performance of wireless networks with unstructured network
topologies is investigated. The network reliability perspective of graph theory
is used to obtain the network outage polynomial of generalized wireless
networks by enumerating paths and cut-sets of its graph representation for both
uncorrelated and correlated wireless channels. A relation is established
between the max-flow min-cut theorem and key communication performance
indicators. The diversity order is equal to the size of the minimum cut-set
between source and destination, and the coding gain is the number of cut-sets
with size equal to the minimum cut. An ergodic capacity analysis of networks
with arbitrary topologies based on the network outage polynomial is also
presented. Numerical results are used to illustrate the technical definitions
and verify the derivations.
