Minimizing outage probability for arbitrary channel distributions

MIMO wireless systems have been a focus of research for several years, mainly because of the promise of increased channel capacity, extended range, and increased reliability. An aspect of this ongoing research has been concerned with transmit precoding given partial information of the channel. This work focuses on designing a transmit covariance to minimize the probability of outage for a given target data rate over a fading MIMO channel whose distribution is known to the transmitter. This problem is addressed by formulating a convex problem via a heuristic relaxation. Structure of the problem is utilized to simplify the numerical implementation. Finally, the performance of this technique relative to other simpler techniques is considered, therefore showing the utility of this computational technique in evaluating other heuristics.