Analytical performance analysis of moment-based estimators of the Nakagami parameter

The Nakagami m distribution is known to capture the envelope distribution of various fading channel conditions in wireless communications. The value of m is indicative of the severity of fading, making its estimation necessary. In this paper we propose a new class of moment based estimators for m, and analyze the performance of all known moment based estimators by deriving their asymptotic variance, and comparing with the Cramer Rao bound (CRB). We also discuss the efficiency of these estimators, derive the CRB in the presence of additive noise, and corroborate our results with Monte Carlo simulations.