Effective rate analysis of MISO Rician fading channels

The delay constraints imposed by future wireless applications require a suitable metric for assessing their impact on the overall system performance. Since the classical Shannon's ergodic capacity fails to do so, the so-called effective rate was recently established as a rigorous alternative. Yet, most prior relevant works have considered only the typical case of Rayleigh fading which allows for tractable manipulations. In this paper, we relax this assumption by considering the more general Rician fading model for multiple-input single-output (MISO) systems. A new, analytical expression for the exact effective rate is derived, along with tractable expressions for the key parameters dictating the effective rate performance in the high and low signal-to-noise (SNR) regimes.