OUTAGE AND ERROR EVENTS IN BURSTY CHANNELS

In this paper the outage concept is discussed. Classic definitions, on ly based on the marginal statistics, are found not to be adequate for a proper characterization of the effect of channel impairments at the application level, A more flexible definition, which incorporates time parameters and appears suitable for the characterization of the perfo rmance of packet communications systems, is proposed, An analytical fr amework for the computation of various performance metrics is also pre sented. A Markov description is assumed for the channel, which allows closed-form solutions and can effectively model many situations of int erest. Outage events are defined as being triggered by tau(b) consecut ive channel errors, and being ended by tau(g) consecutive successes. A numerical example of application is given and extensions of the analy sis to more general definitions are discussed.