Minimum duration outage of wireless Rayleigh-fading links using selection combining

Resilience is a major cornerstone in the development of next generation wireless networks. Important aspects of resilience are the availability and survivability of wireless connections. In order to characterize these properties, we present elementary models for Rayleigh-fading links. An important part of the survivability model is an approximation of the fade duration distribution by an exponential distribution. We utilize this approximation to derive the minimum duration outage of multiple selection combined links, a performance metric for survivability which also captures the channel correlation of time-varying channels. Since the findings are given in closed form, they are much simpler than existing expressions containing infinite series and Bessel functions. Finally, numerical evaluation confirms the accuracy of the approximation and the expressions derived.