Reacquisition induced outages during multipath fading

The standard means of characterizing the impact of multipath fading on wireless communication systems ignores the effect of reacquisition hysterisis. This effect arises because the distortion level at which a receiver losses lock (in the circuits which perform various tasks) is not the same as the level at which it reacquires lock. The utility of a simple formula for predicting reacqisition induced outages is examined via the simulation of realistic fading sequences for two different channel models. In both cases we observe conditions under which reacquisition hysterisis is the dominant source of wireless outages