Outage Exponent for OFDM Channels

OFDM is playing a more and more important role in wireless communication systems. Unfortunately, it is not trivial to conduct a performance analysis of OFDM systems. Therefore, it is highly desired to develop an analytical design and performance analysis framework for OFDM channels. In this paper, the authors consider a unified performance metric for OFDM channels, which they shall refer to as outage exponent. The outage exponent, which is a special exponentially tight upper bound on outage probabilities, presents the fundamental relationship among the outage probability, target transmission rate, capacity of AWGN channel, SNR, and the number of diversity branches.