Joint Impact of Pathloss Shadowing and Fast Fading - An Outage Formula for Wireless Networks

In this paper, we analyse the joint impact of pathloss, shadowing and fast fading on wireless networks. Taking into account the pathloss and the shadowing, we first express the SINR distribution of a mobile located at a given distance from its serving base-station (BS). The moments of this distribution are easily computed, using the Fenton-Wilkinson method, and a fluid model that considers the cellular network as a continuum of BS. Then considering the joint impact of pathloss, shadowing and fast fading, we derive an easily computable outage probability formula, for a mobile located at any distance from its serving BS. We validate our approach by comparing all results to Monte Carlo simulations performed in a traditional hexagonal network. Indeed, we establish that the results given by the formula are close to the ones given by Monte Carlo simulations. The proposed framework is a powerful tool to study performances of cellular networks e.g. OFDMA systems (WiMAX, LTE).