Macrodiversity and Microdiversity in Correlated Shadowed Fading Channels

Outage probabilities in shadowed fading channels are evaluated when macrodiversity and microdiversity techniques are implemented. The existence of correlation at the micro and macro levels is taken into account for the computation of outage probabilities. By modeling shadowing using a gamma probability density function, it is shown that an analytical expression for the outage can be expressed as the product of marginal outages summed with weighting factors that depend on the correlation coefficients at the macro level, assuming a maximal ratio combining at the micro level and selection combining (SC) diversity at the macro level. Results demonstrate the potential use of the approach in the analyses of wireless systems in shadowed fading channels.