  In this article, we investigate the transient behavior of a sequence of
packets/bits traversing a multi-hop wireless network. Our work is motivated by
novel applications from the domain of process automation, Machine-Type
Communication (MTC) and cyber-physical systems, where short messages are
communicated and statistical guarantees need to be provided on a per-message
level. In order to optimize such a network, apart from understanding the
stationary system dynamics, an understanding of the short-term dynamics (i.e.,
transient behavior) is also required. To this end, we derive novel Wireless
Transient Bounds (WTB) for end-to-end delay and backlog in a multi-hop wireless
network using stochastic network calculus approach. WTB depends on the initial
backlog at each node as well as the instantaneous channel states. We
numerically compare WTB with State-Of-The-Art Transient bounds (SOTAT), that
can be obtained by adapting existing stationary bounds, as well as simulation
of the network. While SOTAT and stationary bounds are not able to capture the
short-term system dynamics well, WTB provides relatively tight upper bound and
has a decay rate that closely matches the simulation. This is achieved by WTB
only with a slight increase in the computational complexity, by a factor of O(T
+ N), where T is the duration of the arriving sequence and N is the number of
hops in the network. We believe that the presented analysis and the bounds can
be used as base for future work on transient network optimization, e.g., in
massive MTC, critical MTC, edge computing and autonomous vehicle.
