Temporal behavior of MIMO channel quality metrics

The performance of MIMO systems can be improved or optimized if channel state information (CSI) is known at the transmitter. In such systems, the transmitter adapts to the channel based on some channel metric(s). The design and performance of the adaptive scheme depends on the time-varying nature of the metric(s). Some previous work in this area [P.J. Smith et al., May 2005] includes a derivation of level crossing rates (LCR) and average fade durations (AFD) for channel eigenvalues. In this paper, we extend this work to study the temporal behavior of three channel metrics. In particular, we derive the approximate LCR and AFD for the eigenvalue sum, eigenvalue range and simultaneous eigen mode outages. The analysis has been verified through simulations.