The α-F Composite Fading Distribution: Statistical Characterization and Applications

In this paper, the alpha-F composite fading distribution is introduced. It is worth highlighting that the alpha-F distribution offers more flexibility as it includes the composite F and the alpha-mu distributions, and their inclusive ones, as special cases. Moreover, unlike the composite F and the alpha-mu distributions, the alpha-F distribution jointly considers two important effects, namely the shadowing and the non-linearity of the propagation medium. Novel exact closed-form expressions for the probability density function (PDF), cumulative density function (CDF), moment-generating function, and higher order moments of the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio are derived. The PDF and CDF are then employed to analyze the performance of a wireless communication system. To this end, we derive closed-form expressions for the outage probability, average channel capacity, and average bit error rate for binary coherent and non-coherentmodulation schemes as well as for M-ary modulation schemes. The analytical results are verified through numerical and Monte-Carlo simulations. The results demonstrate that the system performance improves as the non-linearity of the propagationmedium and (or) the multipath parameter increase(s). Additionally, the system performance improves as the shadowing parameter increases. To demonstrate practical applications of the alpha-F distribution, we apply it to realistic channel measurements obtained for two different wireless emerging applications, namely underwater acoustic and device-to-device communications. The results demonstrate that the PDF of the alpha-F distribution provide a good fit to the measured data PDFs compared with other well-known distributions, namely K, kappa-mu shadowed, and alpha-mu distributions.