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We address the cost incurred in increasing the transport capacity of wireless ad hoc networks over what can be attained when sources and destinations communicate over multi-hop paths and nodes can transmit or receive at most one packet at a time. We define the energy efficiency ·(n) as the bit-meters of information transferred in the network for each unit energy. We compute the energy efficiency of many different techniques aimed at increasing the capacity of wireless networks and show that, in order to achieve higher transport capacity, a lower energy efficiency must be attained. Using the physical model, we compute the throughput capacity of random wireless ad hoc networks in which nodes are endowed with multi-packet reception (MPR) capabilities. We show that λ(n)= Θ (R(n))^(1-2/α) / n^1/α) bits per second constitutes a tight upper and lower bound for the throughput of random wireless ad hoc networks …