MGF Approach to the Analysis of Generalized Two-Ray Fading Models

We analyze a class of Generalized Two-Ray (GTR) fading channels that consist of two line of sight (LOS) components with random phase plus a diffuse component. We derive a closed form expression for the moment generating function (MGF) of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for this model, which greatly simplifies its analysis. This expression arises from the observation that the GTR fading model can be expressed in terms of a conditional underlying Rician distribution. We illustrate the approach to derive simple expressions for statistics and performance metrics of interest such as the amount of fading, the level crossing rate, the symbol error rate, and the ergodic capacity in GTR fading channels. We also show that the effect of considering a more general distribution for the phase difference between the LOS components has an impact on the average SNR.Comment: 14 pages, 8 Figures and 2 Tables. This work has been accepted for publication at IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. Copyright (c) 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to use this material for any other purposes must be obtained from the IEEE by sending a request to [email protected]