Capacity and outage performance of regional signal combining using distributed antennas

For cellular systems with base stations (BS´s) equipped with distributed antennas, various cooperative signal transmission strategies can be employed. In this paper, we analyze the trade-off between the transmission capacity and the outage probability when downlink signals from two geographically separated antennas are combined. It is demonstrated a significant reduction in the outage probability can be achieved while simultaneously improving the capacity, when signal combining is selectively performed based on the carrier-to-interference ratio (CIR) measurement at a given mobile station (MS). Experimental results show the outage (CIR less than 0 dB) probability reduces by 54.1% with the capacity increase of 7.4% for the fading channel condition.