Generalised outage probability and BER estimation using dual protection margins

The design of tomorrow's mobile communications systems will require accurate mathematical tools for estimating the performance of potential system configurations. Ideally these tools will be easy to apply and be based upon parameters that can be estimated by a simple appraisal of the propagation environment. In this paper a general outage probability technique for considering the effect of noise and cochannel interference on reception reliability is presented. The technique is used to assess the compatibility and applicability of previously published techniques as that either treat noise as cochannel interference or consider a minimum detectable received signal threshold. A simple yet accurate threshold-based technique is described and used to predict bit error rates (BER) for a variety of conditions. Specifically, outage probability is used to accurately predict average BER.<>