Communication in decentralized wireless networks is limited by interference. Because transmissions typically last for more than a single contention time slot, interference often exhibits a strong statistical dependence over time that results in temporally correlated communication performance. The temporal dependence in interference increases as user mobility decreases and/or the total transmission time increases. We propose a network model that spans the extremes of temporal independence to long-term temporal dependence. Using the proposed model, closed-form single hop communication performance metrics are derived that are asymptotically exact in the low outage regime. The primary contributions are (i) deriving the joint temporal statistics of network interference} and showing that it follows a multivariate symmetric alpha stable distribution; (ii) utilizing the joint interference statistics to derive closed-form expressions for local delay, throughput outage probability, and average network throughput; and (iii) using the joint interference statistics to redefine and analyze the network} transmission capacity that the throughput-delay-reliability tradeoffs in single hop transmissions. Simulation results verify the closed-form expressions derived in this paper and we demonstrate up to 2x gain in network throughput and reliability by optimizing certain parameters of medium access control layer protocol in view of the temporal correlations. © 2012 IEEE.