  The outage probability limit is a fundamental and achievable lower bound on
the word error rate of coded communication systems affected by fading. This
limit is mainly determined by two parameters: the diversity order and the
coding gain. With linear precoding, full diversity on a block fading channel
can be achieved without error-correcting code. However, the effect of precoding
on the coding gain is not well known, mainly due to the complicated expression
of the outage probability. Using a geometric approach, this paper establishes
simple upper bounds on the outage probability, the minimization of which yields
to precoding matrices that achieve very good performance. For discrete
alphabets, it is shown that the combination of constellation expansion and
precoding is sufficient to closely approach the minimum possible outage
achieved by an i.i.d. Gaussian input distribution, thus essentially maximizing
the coding gain.
