A Unified Fading Model Using Generalized Gamma Convolutions

Abstract

This paper proposes to unify fading distributions by modeling the magnitude-squared of the instantaneous channel gain using generalized gamma convolutions (GGC). A random variable is said to be GGC, if it can be written as the limit of a sum of independent gamma variables potentially with different parameters. We show that GGC random variables have many useful mathematical properties, that are applied in the performance analysis of wireless systems. The proposed unification subsumes several classes of multipath and shadowing fading distributions previously proposed in the wireless communications literature.