Outage Analysis of Correlated Source Transmission in Block Rayleigh Fading Channels

A goal of this paper is to theoretically derive the outage probability of the correlated source transmission in block Rayleigh fading channels. The correlation between the two information sources is assumed to be expressed by the bit flipping model, where the information bits transmitted from the second transmitter are the flipped version of the information bits transmitted from the first one, with a probability pe. The source sequences are independently channel-encoded, and then transmitted to the destination block-by-block via different time- or frequency-slots. The channels are assumed to be suffering from independent block Rayleigh fading. This paper shows that the outage probability of this system can be expressed by double integrals with respect to the probability density functions (pdf) of the instantaneous signal-to-noise power ratios (SNRs) of those channels, where the range of the integration is determined by the Slepian-Wolf theorem. The most significant finding made by this paper is that the asymptotic diversity order is one so far as pe is non-zero, and the 2nd order diversity can be achieved only if pe = 0. The major applications of this paper´s results include outage evaluation of extract-and-forward (EF) relay systems allowing intra-link (source-relay link) errors, sensor networks, and wireless mesh networks. The latter half of this paper provides results of outage probability calculations for one-way EF relay scenario utilizing the concept of the technique presented in this work.