Amplitude Distributions of Mobile Fading Channels: Impact on Communication Performances

In this paper, we consider several kinds of fading channels which are used to describe the multipath effect, including Rayleigh, Rice, Nakagami, Nakagami-Hoyt, and $\kappa - \mu$. The communication performance indicators for each kind of channel, such as instantaneous signal-to-noise rate (SNR), outage probability (OP), and average error rate are analyzed and some novel expressions are derived. Among them, the OP is derived by calculating the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the instantaneous SNR, and the average error rate is derived from the probability density function (PDF) of the instantaneous SNR with integral operation, by using the direct method or the moment generating function method. The most obvious result is that the increase of channel parameters $m, \kappa, \mu$, and q leads to lower OP and lower average error rate. Moreover, the same results can be obtained by taking the same special case of different generalized fading channels.