Selection of diversity and modulation parameters for Nakagami fading channels to jointly satisfy outage and bit error requirements

Outage is an event of instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio or bit error rate falling in an unacceptable operational regime. Outage performance analysis is traditionally carried out for diverse channel behaviors and transmission techniques, leaving the identification of unacceptable operational regime to user specified performance requirements. The paper takes an alternative approach and an acceptable combination of system parameters are identified such that the user specified quality of service (QoS) constraints are satisfied. The QoS constraints are specified jointly in terms of outage probability, outage duration and probability of occurrence of errors during the outage event. The paper presents inter-dependencies between the QoS constraints and modulation, diversity and signal parameters in closed form. The analysis assumes identically, independently distributed Nakagami interferers using maximal ratio diversity combining (MRC).