Unified Framework for Diversity and Coding Gains Over a Broad Gaussian Class of Fading Channels

• Published in: IEEE transactions on vehicular technology Vol. 72; no. 12; pp. 1 - 15
• Main Authors: Parente, Francisco Raimundo Albuquerque, Calmon, Flavio du Pin, Filho, Jose Candido Silveira Santos
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.12.2023; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Channels; Closed form solutions; Clustering; Codes; Coding; Correlation; Diversity receivers; Diversity reception; Encoding; error rate; Exact solutions; Fading; fading channels; high signal-to-noise ratio; Links; Millimeter wave communication; Millimeter waves; millimeter-wave systems; Nonlinearity; Rayleigh channels; Signal to noise ratio; Wave propagation; Wireless communication; Wireless communication systems
• ISSN: 0018-9545; 1939-9359
• DOI: 10.1109/TVT.2023.3293750

Multipath fading is a major hindrance to the performance of wireless communication systems. For various blends of common propagation aspects-wave clustering, medium nonlinearity, correlation, scattering, and specular components-, the resulting fading model or the corresponding performance analysis is unavailable in a closed form, a drawback that becomes more prominent when source and destination are connected via multiple links. In those cases, little, if any, insight is gained into the overall system behavior. Herein, we shed light on this subject by providing a novel asymptotic framework at high signal-to-noise ratio that yields simple, general, and unified closed-form expressions for the diversity and coding gains in the symbol error rate and outage probability over a broad Gaussian class of fading channels. The proposed framework reveals how each physical aspect of fading and the number of diversity links primarily affect wireless communications. The analysis also resolves the long-standing problem of how each physical element of generalized Gaussian-class fading channels impacts multibranch diversity receivers. The strength and generality of our approach are illustrated by assessing the performance of emerging millimeter-wave systems. Finally, representative numerical results are presented and discussed to demonstrate that all the addressed fading aspects and system parameters affect the coding gain, whereas only the clustering, nonlinearity, and number of links affect the diversity gain.