Minimum duration outage for cellular systems with reception diversity

The notion of minimum duration outage was introduced by Mandayam, Chen and Holtzman (see Proceedings of IEEE VTC, vol.2, p.879-83, Atlanta, 1996), where outage was defined as the signal staying below a level for a certain minimum duration. We extend this concept to a scenario where there is diversity in reception. Thus, there is a minimum duration outage only when two signals are simultaneously below the threshold for a minimum duration. The minimum duration outage is related to the mobile speed, correlation distance, and time dependence of signals. We analyze the outage performance with reception diversity by studying the dynamics of the signal to interference ratio (SIR) levels from two different signals going simultaneously below a certain level