The Throughput–Reliability Tradeoff in Block-Fading MIMO Channels

Abstract

We build on Zheng and Tse's elegant formulation of diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) to provide a better understanding of the asymptotic interplay between transmission rate, error probability, and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in block-fading multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels. In particular, we identify the limitation imposed by the notion of multiplexing gain and develop a new formulation called the throughput-reliability tradeoff (TRT), that avoids this limitation. The new characterization is then used to elucidate the asymptotic trends exhibited by the outage probability curves of block-fading MIMO channels.