Outage probability analysis of a CDMA system with antenna arrays in a correlated Rayleigh environment

This paper presents the derivation of the outage probability of a CDMA system, which employs a linear antenna array at the base station. The outage probability is an important performance measure for mobile communications, which is the probability that the signal to interference ratio (SIR) will be below a certain threshold. The performance improvement obtained by the antenna array is reduced due to correlation between array elements, therefore the correlated Rayleigh fading environment is considered in the whole analysis. The correlation between antennas is constituted as a function of angle of arrival, angle spread and antenna spacing. By proposing an approach, the conditional probability density function and the corresponding conditional outage probability of the SIR are derived for given covariance matrices. Here, the approximate unconditional outage probability is determined based on the previous derivation. Theoretical results are compared to Monte Carlo simulations. Results show that there is a good match between the theory and the simulation