  In this paper, an outage limited MIMO channel is considered. We build on
Zheng and Tse's elegant formulation of the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff to
develop a better understanding of the asymptotic relationship between the
probability of error, transmission rate, and signal-to-noise ratio. In
particular, we identify the limitation imposed by the multiplexing gain notion
and develop a new formulation for the throughput-reliability tradeoff that
avoids this limitation. The new characterization is then used to elucidate the
asymptotic trends exhibited by the outage probability curves of MIMO channels.
