Effective Throughput Analysis of α-η-κ-μ Fading Channels

The α-η-κ-µ fading model is a very useful instrument to accurately describe various radio
wave propagation scenarios. In this paper, we study the effective throughput performance of communication
systems over the α-η-κ-µ fading channels. Novel and exact expressions for the effective throughput over
α-η-κ-µ channels are derived, and the effective throughput of multiple-input single-output (MISO) and
multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems over some widely used small-scale fading models are
presented based on the derived results. To obtain more understandings on the impact of physical channel
characteristics and system configuration on the effective throughput, closed-form expressions for the
asymptotic effective throughput at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes are also obtained. The results
reveal the underlying connections between different physical channel parameters (e.g., scattering level, phase
correlation, channel nonlinearity, multipath clustering, and channel imbalance) and the effective throughput.
It is found that the effective throughput improves with the increase of channel nonlinearity and number of
multipath clusters, and the high-SNR slope is only dependent on the channel nonlinearity and the number of
multipath clusters present in the physical channel.