Abstract : This paper studies the statistical analysis of cascaded Nakagami-m fading channels that are arbitrarily correlated and not necessarily identically distributed. The probability density function (PDF), cumulative distribution function (CDF), and the n-th moment for the product of N correlated Nakagami-m random variables (RVs) are derived and presented in exact form expressions using the Meijer’s G function. The cascaded channels are assumed to have flat and slow fading with arbitrarily non-identical fading severity parameters. Using these results, the impact of channel correlation and fading severity parameters are investigated for the cascaded Nakagami-m channels. Furthermore, performance analysis addressed by outage probability (OP), average channel capacity, and average bit error probability (BEP) for coherently detected binary PSK and FSK signals are derived. As a consequence of the versatility of Nakagami-m distribution, the derived expressions can compromise the statistics of other useful multivariate distributions such as One-sided Gaussian distribution with m = 1/2 and Rayleigh distribution with m = 1. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the derived expressions are novel and have not been reported in the literature. To aid and verify the theoretical analysis, numerical results authenticated by Monte Carlo simulation are presented.
Index terms : cascaded fading channels , Nakagami-m distribution , generalized correlation , outage probability , average channel capacity , average bit error probability