On the Relationships Between Average Channel Capacity, Average Bit Error Rate, Outage Probability, and Outage Capacity Over Additive White Gaussian Noise Channels

In the theory of wireless communications, average performance measures (APMs) are widely utilized to quantify the performance gains/impairments in various fading environments under various scenarios, and to comprehend how the factors arising from design/implementation affect system performance. To the best of our knowledge, it has not been yet discovered in the literature how these APMs relate to each other. In this article, to supplement the APM analyses available in the literature we propose that one APM can be calculated using the other APMs instead of using the end-to-end SNR distribution. Particularly, using the Lamperti's transformation (LT), we propose a tractable approach, which we call LT-based APM analysis, to identify a relationship between any two given APMs such that it is irrespective of SNR distribution. Thereby, we introduce some novel relationships among average channel capacity (ACC), average bit error rate (ABER) and outage probability/capacity (OP/OC) performances, and accordingly present how to obtain ACC from ABER performance and how to obtain OP/OC from ACC performance in fading environments. We demonstrate that the ACC of any communications system can be evaluated empirically without using end-to-end SNR distribution. We consider some numerical examples and simulations to validate our newly derived relationships.

I. Introduction

In the theory of wireless communications, average bit error rate (ABER), average channel capacity (ACC) and outage probability/capacity (OP/OC) are some of those average performance measure s (APMs) that are commonly utilized to investigate various performance aspects of communications systems. Each APM serves a pivotal role not only in interpreting the discovered techniques for higher data transmission, efficient mobility and lower complexity but also in gaining insight into the requirements for achieving sophisticated usage of radio frequencies with a higher quality of service. As such, each APM has been used to quantify the performance gains/impairments under various communication scenarios and to comprehend how factors arising from design/implementation (e.g. channel noise, receiver noise, diversity, interference, multipath shadowing and fading) affect overall system performance [2]–[4].