Outage and error events in bursty channels

The outage concept is discussed. Classic definitions, only based on the marginal statistics, are found not to be adequate for a proper characterization of the effect of channel impairments at the application level. A more flexible definition, which incorporates time parameters and appears suitable for the characterization of the performance of packet communications systems, is proposed. An analytical framework for the computation of various performance metrics is also presented. A Markov description is assumed for the channel, which allows closed-form solutions and can effectively model many situations of interest. Outage events are defined as being triggered by τ_b consecutive channel errors, and being ended by τ_g consecutive successes. A numerical example of application is given, and extensions of the analysis to more general definitions are discussed