Abstract -We study the problem of communication reliability and diversity in multi-hop wireless networks. Our aim is to develop a new network model that better takes into account the fading nature of the wireless physical layer. To that end, we use the outage probability model for a fading channel to develop a probabilistic model for a wireless link. This model establishes a relationship between the link reliability, the distance between communicating nodes and the transmission power. Applying this probabilistic model to a multi-hop network setting, we define and analyze the end-to-end route reliability and develop algorithms for finding the optimal route between a pair of nodes. The relationship between the reliability of the optimal route and the consumed power is studied. The idea of route diversity is introduced as a way to improve the end-to-end route reliability by taking advantage of the wireless broadcast property, the independence of fade state between different pairs of nodes...