  This paper presents a set of new results directly exploring the special
characteristics of the wireless channel capacity process. An appealing finding
is that, for typical fading channels, their instantaneous capacity and
cumulative capacity are both light-tailed. A direct implication of this finding
is that the cumulative capacity and subsequently the delay and backlog
performance can be upper-bounded by some exponential distributions, which is
often assumed but not justified in the wireless network performance analysis
literature. In addition, various bounds are derived for distributions of the
cumulative capacity and the delay-constrained capacity, considering three
representative dependence structures in the capacity process, namely
comonotonicity, independence, and Markovian. To help gain insights in the
performance of a wireless channel whose capacity process may be too complex or
detailed information is lacking, stochastic orders are introduced to the
capacity process, based on which, results to compare the delay and
delay-constrained capacity performance are obtained. Moreover, the impact of
self-interference in communication, which is an open problem in stochastic
network calculus (SNC), is investigated and original results are derived. The
obtained results in this paper complement the SNC literature, easing its
application to wireless networks and its extension towards a calculus for
wireless networks.
