Outage Probability of Diversity Combining Receivers in Arbitrarily Fading Channels

TL;DR

This paper introduces a saddlepoint approximation method to accurately evaluate outage probability in diversity combining receivers over arbitrary fading channels, simplifying calculations with closed-form solutions in many cases.

Contribution

It presents a novel, simple approach using saddlepoint approximation for outage probability evaluation that applies to arbitrary fading channels and reduces to closed-form expressions in key scenarios.

Findings

High accuracy of the method for practical outage values

Applicable to a wide range of fading and system parameters

Simplifies outage probability calculations

Abstract

We propose a simple and accurate method to evaluate the outage probability at the output of arbitrarily fading L-branch diversity combining receiver. The method is based on the saddlepoint approximation, which only requires the knowledge of the moment generating functions of the signal-to-noise ratio at the output of each diversity branch. In addition, we show that the obtained results reduce to closed-form expressions in many particular cases of practical interest. Numerical results illustrate a very high accuracy of the proposed method for practical outage values and for a large mixture of fading and system parameters.