Hybrid diversity-beamforming technique for outage probability minimization in spatially correlated channels

In this paper, we present a hybrid multi-antenna technique that can minimize the outage probability by combining the diversity and beamforming techniques. The hybrid technique clusters the transmission antennas into multiple groups and exploit diversity among different groups and beamforming within each group. We analyze the performance of the resulting hybrid technique for an arbitrary correlation among the transmission antennas. Through the performance analysis, we derive a closed-form expression of the outage probability for the hybrid technique. This enables to optimize the antenna grouping for the given spatial correlation. We show through numerical results that the hybrid technique can balance the trade-offs between diversity and beamforming according to the spatial correlation and that the optimally designed hybrid technique yields a much lower outage probability than the diversity or beamforming technique does in partially correlated fading channels.