On Outage Behavior of Wideband Slow-Fading Channels

Abstract: This paper investigates point-to-point information transmission over a wideband slow-fading channel, modeled as an (asymptotically) large number of independent identically distributed parallel channels, with the random channel fading realizations remaining constant over the entire coding block. On the one hand, in the wideband limit the minimum achievable energy per nat required for reliable transmission, as a random variable, converges in probability to certain deterministic quantity. On the other hand, the exponential decay rate of the outage probability, termed as the wideband outage exponent, characterizes how the number of parallel channels, {\it i.e.}, the ``bandwidth'', should asymptotically scale in order to achieve a targeted outage probability at a targeted energy per nat. We examine two scenarios: when the transmitter has no channel state information and adopts uniform transmit power allocation among parallel channels; and when the transmitter is endowed with an one-bit channel state feedback for each parallel channel and accordingly allocates its transmit power. For both scenarios, we evaluate the wideband minimum energy per nat and the wideband outage exponent, and discuss their implication for system performance.