Performance of Optimum Combining in a Poisson Field of Interferers and Rayleigh Fading Channels

This paper studies the performance of antenna array processing in distributed multiple access networks without power control. The interference is represented as a Poisson point process. Desired and interfering signals are subject to both path-loss fading (with an exponent greater than 2) and to independent Rayleigh fading. Using these assumptions, we derive the exact closed form expression for the cumulative distribution function of the output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio when optimum combining is applied. This results in a pertinent measure of the network performance in terms of the outage probability, which in turn provides insights into the network capacity gain that could be achieved with antenna array processing. We present and discuss examples of applications, as well as some numerical results.