The Effect of Shadow Fading Distributions on Outage Probability and Coverage Area

Abstract

This study addresses the problem of the determining network performance metrics, the outage probability ($p_{out}$) and the coverage area ($C(\phi)$) more accurately, based on the distribution of shadow fading. Shadow fading characteristics are crucial in order to calculate of $p_{out}$ and $C(\phi)$ more properly. We investigate existing shadow fading models, lognormal, Gamma and Weibull distributions on empirical data and also propose a new lognormal mixtures model. We calculate $p_{out}$ and $C(\phi)$ according to the considered distributions and verify that shadow fading distribution needs to be accurately determined in order to obtain correct values of outage probability and coverage area.