The Lomax Distribution for Wireless Channel Modeling: Theory and Applications

We investigate the application of the Lomax distribution for wireless fading modeling purposes. By a proper redefinition of its scale parameter, we present closed-form expressions for its main statistics: probability density function, cumulative distribution function, raw moments and Laplace-domain statistics. Then, relevant performance indicators are derived, including the amount of fading, channel capacity, outage probability and error rate. Other applications include diversity reception using selection combining, as well as composite fading modeling. The Lomax distribution is compared to the relevant case of Rayleigh fading, and to other benchmark distributions of similar complexity used in the literature.