The Weibull-lognormal fading channel: analysis, simulation, and validation

In frequency-nonselective fading channels, the partial waves arriving at the mobile receiver cannot explicitly be of homogeneous nature due to nonuniform scattering caused by objects of specific reflective nature. Moreover, shadowing influences the received signal level by causing slow variations to its local mean. In this paper, we investigate a mixture stochastic process accounting for both inhomogeneous scattering and shadow fading by multiplying a Weibull process with a lognormal process. The first process models the possible scattering nonuniformities of the channel, whereas the second process accounts for the slow-term variations of the local mean due to shadowing. An exact solution for the composite probability density function (pdf) will be given, together with approximate solutions for the second-order statistics, i.e., the level crossing rate (LCR) and the average duration of fades (ADF). The approximate solutions come from the assumption of a slowly time-varying lognormal process compared with the Weibull process, the validity of which will be tested via an efficient deterministic simulation scheme that implements the analytical model on a digital computer. Finally, a curve fitting of the LCR to real-world data drawn from channel measurements will demonstrate the flexibility and usefulness of the proposed model.