Efficient Importance Sampling Algorithm Applied to the Performance Analysis of Wireless Communication Systems Estimation

When assessing the performance of wireless communication systems operating over fading channels, one often encounters the problem of computing expectations of some functional of sums of independent random variables (RVs). The outage probability (OP) at the output of Equal Gain Combining (EGC) and Maximum Ratio Combining (MRC) receivers is among the most important performance metrics that falls within this framework. In general, closed form expressions of expectations of functionals applied to sums of RVs are out of reach. A naive Monte Carlo (MC) simulation is of course an alternative approach. However, this method requires a large number of samples for rare event problems (small OP values for instance). Therefore, it is of paramount importance to use variance reduction techniques to develop fast and efficient estimation methods. In this work, we use importance sampling (IS), being known for its efficiency in requiring less computations for achieving the same accuracy requirement. In this line, we propose a state-dependent IS scheme based on a stochastic optimal control (SOC) formulation to calculate rare events quantities that could be written in a form of an expectation of some functional of sums of independent RVs. Our proposed algorithm is generic and can be applicable without any restriction on the univariate distributions of the different fading envelops/gains or on the functional that is applied to the sum. We apply our approach to the Log-Normal distribution to compute the OP at the output of diversity receivers with and without co-channel interference. For each case, we show numerically that the proposed state-dependent IS algorithm compares favorably to most of the well-known estimators dealing with similar problems.