Effect of microdiversity and correlated macrodiversity on outages in a cellular system

We focus on maximum ratio combining at each base station and switching between base stations (BSs) as a simple macrodiversity technique. We obtain analytical results for pointwise outage probabilities for systems using one or a combination of both techniques to cover a desired area, assuming a certain correlation model for the set of path losses of the links connecting a terminal to the receiving BSs. Pointwise outage probabilities are averaged over the entire region of interest to get an estimate of the outage in the desired region. A comparison of micro- and macrodiversity schemes in terms of the outage gives insights as to the tradeoff between the two forms of diversity in the design of a cellular system.