Digital Communications Over Generalized Fading Channels

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to present fading and diversity in mobile wireless communi-cation systems. Fading is a great obstacle in the design of efficient systems and diversityis a powerful mean, used to overcome it.In this thesis we will make a brief overview of mobile wireless communication systems,in order to denote the importance of those systems and outline the problems caused byfading. As far as fading is concerned, we make a detailed presentation of various modelsused to describe fading. As far as diversity is concerned, we present several techniques,used to combine the signal and output the most efficient result.In order to support the theoretical analysis made in both fading and diversity, sim-ulations of the systems under consideration are made. We discuss various results andcompare diversity combining methods and fading channel models.Throughout the whole thesis, special focus is given to the generalized-K fading dis-tribution, a distribution that is very useful, as it includes other distributions as specialcases and combines different types of fading, which means that it can apply in a realisticpropagation environment, something that is not the case for numerous fading distribu-tions.