Impact of Topology and Shadowing on the Outage Probability of Cellular Networks

This paper proposes an analytical study of the shadowing impact on the outage probability in cellular radio networks. We establish that the downlink other-cell interference factor, f, which is defined here as the ratio of outer cell received power to the inner cell received power, plays a fundamental role in the outage probability. From f, we are able to derive the outage probability of a mobile station (MS) initiating a new call. Taking into account the shadowing, f is expressed as a lognormal random variable. Analytical expressions of the interference factor´s mean m_f and standard deviation s_f are provided in this paper. These expressions depend on the topology of the network characterized by a G factor. We show that shadowing increases the outage probability, and using our analytical method, we are able to quantify this impact. However, we establish that the network topology, or correlated received powers, may limit this increase.