Effect of mobile velocity on communications in fading channels

In a fading channel, it is well known that the rate of channel variation is dependent on the velocity of the mobile. Consequently, depending on the channel correlation, successive symbols transmitted over the channel can suffer from very similar or possibly very different fading conditions. In this paper, we present an analytical model to evaluate the effect of mobile velocity on the performance of a communication system operating in a multipath fading channel. To incorporate the effect of velocity, a Markov process is used which captures the correlated nature of the channel. An error recursion is then developed which considers the effect of closed-loop power control, channel coding, and finite interleaving. In the numerical analysis, we use the analytical model to investigate the tradeoffs when these various schemes are used. We demonstrate how the performance of these different schemes is sensitive to mobile velocity.