QoS-based outage probability for diversity reception

In a digital mobile radio system with fast fading superimposed on slow fading, the symbol error probability (SEP) alone is not sufficient to describe the link quality. In this case, a reasonable performance measure related to the slow channel variations is the outage probability (OP). This paper addresses the problem of evaluating SEP-based OP for multichannel reception with maximal ratio combining (MRC). To this end, we derive upper and lower bounds on the OP from upper and lower bounds on the inverse SEP respectively. As an example of application to digital mobile radio, the SEP-based outage probability in a log-normal shadowing environment is analyzed.