Moment-based estimation of the Nakagami-m fading parameter

Moment-based estimation of the Nakagami-m (1960) fading parameter is considered for both noiseless and noisy environments. For a noiseless environment, a family of new estimators, which uses lower order fractional sample moments, is shown to achieve better performance than the best known moment-based estimator and to achieve comparable performance to an approximate maximum-likelihood estimator. A new estimator is proposed for noisy environments and its performance is compared with an estimator derived for low noise environments.