Outage Probability for Diversity Combining in Interference-Limited Channels

Many wireless data communication systems such as LTE, and Wi-Fi, are increasingly facing interference that is much stronger than thermal noise. Interference may arise due to dense spatial reuse of spectrum intended to increase user data rates, or from other devices emitting radiation in the same spectrum, or from electronic circuitry within the communication platform. For a multi-antenna receiver operating in an interference-limited channel, we evaluate four diversity combining algorithms in terms of outage probability in the low-outage regime. The contributions of this paper are (1) derivation of closed-form expressions for the output signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) statistics of fixed weight, maximal ratio, selection and post-detection combining; (2) comparison of the relative outage performance of these algorithms; and (3) proposed diversity combining algorithms to reduce outage probability. Our results can be applied in analyzing the outage performance and throughput capacity of both centralized and decentralized interference-limited wireless networks.