The κ-μ Extreme Distribution

A number of realistic wireless applications can be found for which the propagated signal may experience extreme fading conditions. In particular, a recent work has reported on an experiment conducted within an enclosed environment where it has been shown that the fading conditions are indeed harsh, drastically departing from those predicted by traditional fading models. This paper investigates the κ-μ Extreme fading distribution, a member of the κ-μ fading model and obtained from it when its parameters reach their extreme values (κ → ∞ and μ → 0) for a fixed amount of fading. Field data reported elsewhere and collected in enclosed environment, along with other fading data collected by the authors' team, are used to compare the curve fit performance of the κ-μ Extreme model and the recently proposed Two-Ray distribution. The results show that the κ-μ Extreme distribution is flexible and suitable to model these scenarios. The performance of this new model is then explored in the three basic combining techniques, namely selection, maximum ratio, and equal gain, and a number of exact, closed-form formulas are obtained. Interestingly, it is shown that in extreme fading conditions, the selection combiner may outperform the equal gain combiner.