Diversity–Multiplexing Tradeoff and Outage Performance for Rician MIMO Channels

In this paper, we analyze the diversity–multiplexing tradeoff (DMT), originally introduced by Zheng and Tse, and outage performance for Rician multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) channels. The DMT characteristics of Rayleigh and Rician channels are shown to be identical. In a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, the log–log plot of outage probability versus SNR curve for a Rician channel is a shifted version of that for the corresponding Rayleigh channel. The SNR gap between the outage curves of the Rayleigh and Rician channels is derived. The DMT and outage performance are also analyzed for Rician multiple-input–single-output (MISO)/single-input–multiple-output (SIMO) channels over a finite SNR regime. A closed-form expression for the outage probability is derived and the finite SNR DMT characteristic is analyzed. It is observed that the maximum diversity gain can be achieved at some finite SNR–the maximum gain tends to increase linearly with the Rician factor. The finite SNR diversity gain is shown to be a linear function of the finite SNR multiplexing gain. The consistency between the DMTs for finite and infinite SNRs is also shown.