  The capacity of line networks with buffer size constraints is an open, but
practically important problem. In this paper, the upper bound on the achievable
rate of a class of codes, called batched codes, is studied for line networks.
Batched codes enable a range of buffer size constraints, and are general enough
to include special coding schemes studied in the literature for line networks.
Existing works have characterized the achievable rates of batched codes for
several classes of parameter sets, but leave the cut-set bound as the best
existing general upper bound. In this paper, we provide upper bounds on the
achievable rates of batched codes as functions of line network length for these
parameter sets. Our upper bounds are tight in order of the network length
compared with the existing achievability results.
