Transient analysis of minimum duration outage for RF channel in cellular systems

Following Mandayam et al., we define outage events as the channel being attenuated for at least a deterministic period of time, τm. Compared with continuous time Markov chain or discrete time Markov chain, a semi-Markov process (SMP) is general enough that it allows the sojourn time to be any distribution function. In this paper, we develop a minimum duration outage model based on an SMP. Closed-form expressions are derived for the time dependent and steady state probabilities of outage. Describing the outage event in the transient regime, our model can reflect the channel fading behavior in a dynamic way.