Compound Outage Probability and Capacity of a Class of Fading MIMO Channels With Channel Distribution Uncertainty

Outage probability and capacity of a class of block-fading MIMO channels are considered with partial channel distribution information. Specifically, the channel or its distribution is not known but the latter is known to belong to a class of distributions where each member is within a certain distance (uncertainty) from a nominal distribution. Relative entropy is used as a measure of distance between distributions. Compound outage probability defined as min (over the transmit signal distribution) -max (over the channel distribution class) outage probability is introduced and investigated. This generalizes the standard outage probability to the case of partial channel distribution information.