Outage and BER with microdiversity and correlated macrodiversity

We focus on maximum ratio combining at each base station and switching between base stations as a simple macrodiversity technique. We obtain analytical results for outage (uncovered fraction of a cell) and bit error rate for systems using one or a combination of both techniques to cover a desired area, assuming a certain correlation model for the set of path losses of the links connecting a terminal to the receiving base stations. Outage probabilities and bit error rates are averaged over the entire region of interest to get an estimate of the outage fraction in the desired region