Average Outage Duration of Wireless Communication Systems

Abstract

Outage probability has been traditionally the most commonly used performance measure of wireless communication systems. However, in certain communication system applications such as adaptive transmission schemes, the outage probability does not provide enough information for the overall system design and configuration. In that case, in addition to the outage probability, the frequency of outages (or equivalently the level crossing rate (LCR)) and the average outage duration (AOD) are important performance measures for the proper selection of the transmission symbol rate, interleaver depth, packet length, and/or time slot duration. In this chapter, we present closed-form expressions for the LCR and AOD of some diversity combining schemes of interest with and without multiple co-channel interferences (CCI) and over independent, correlated, and/or unbalanced channels considering minimum signal-tointerference ratio (SIR) and/or desired signal power constraints. More specifically, the chapter presents generic results for the LCR and AOD (i) of maximal ratio combining systems subject to CCI operating over independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) Rician and/or Nakagami fading environments when a minimum desired signal power requirement is specified for satisfactory reception, (ii) of various selection combining diversity scheme in presence of multiple CCI and with both minimum SIR and desired signal power constraints over independent, correlated, and/or unbalanced channels. Corresponding numerical examples and plots illustrating the mathematical formalism are also provided and discussed.KeywordsOutage ProbabilityWireless Communication SystemMaximal Ratio CombineSelection CombineCochannel InterferenceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.