Theory 31/Telecommunications Engineering

Link Margin Is an Allocation

The claim

Link reliability is set by how the total margin is distributed across fading and interference rather than by the total margin, so two links with equal budgets can differ in outage.

01Mechanism

Outage occurs when any single impairment exceeds its share of the margin; an unbalanced allocation fails at one impairment while the other remains unused.

02Predictions

P1Outage should track the allocation ratio.
P2Total margin alone should mispredict.

03Refutation

Outage tracking total margin would remove the allocation.