The Throughput-Reliability Tradeoff in MIMO Channels

In this paper, an outage limited MIMO channel is considered. We build on Zheng and Tse's elegant formulation of the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff to develop a better understanding of the asymptotic relationship between the probability of error, transmission rate, and signal-to-noise ratio. In particular, we identify the limitation imposed by the multiplexing gain notion and develop a new formulation for the throughput-reliability tradeoff that avoids this limitation. The new characterization is then used to elucidate the asymptotic trends exhibited by the outage probability curves of MIMO channels.