Capacity and outage performance of regional signal combining using distributed antennas

For cellular systems with base stations (BS's) equipped with distributed antennas, various cooperative signal transmission strategies can be employed. In this paper, we analyze the trade-off between the transmission capacity and the outage probability when downlink signals from two geographically separated antennas are combined. It is demonstrated a significant reduction in the outage probability can be achieved while simultaneously improving the capacity, when signal combining is selectively performed based on the carrier-to-interference ratio (CIR) measurement at a given mobile station (MS). Experimental results show the outage (CIR less than 0 dB) probability reduces by 54.1% with the capacity increase of 7.4% for the fading channel condition.