The Effect of Shadow Fading Distributions on Outage Probability and Coverage Area

This study addresses the problem of the determining network performance metrics, the outage probability (pout) and the coverage area (C(φ)) more accurately, based on the distribution of shadow fading. Shadow fading characteristics are crucial in order to calculate of pout and C(φ) more properly. We investigate existing shadow fading models, lognormal, Gamma and Weibull distributions on empirical data and also propose a new lognormal mixtures model. We calculate pout and C(φ) according to the considered distributions and verify that shadow fading distribution needs to be accurately determined in order to obtain correct values of outage probability and coverage area.