Statistical Analysis of the Wireless Propagation Channel and Its Mutual Information

This thesis considers the statistical analysis of the mobile radio propagation channel and certain functions of it. First, mutual information of the fading multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless channel is analyzed. Specifically, an approximate distribution of mutual information for Rayleigh fading MIMO channels as well as an upper bound for the ergodic mutual information for Rician fading channels are derived. A novel decomposition of mutual information at high SNR is also considered. The decomposition also leads to an appealing measure for spatial multiplexing efficiency, or multipath richness, of a MIMO radio channel. As the second topic, the amplitude distribution function of the general multiple scattering radio channel is derived. Rayleigh, Rice, and double-Rayleigh distributions are special cases of the general result. In the third topic, an additive model is proposed as a physical basis for shadow fading – as an alternative to the conventional multiplicative one. A simple analytical justification for the log-normality of small area shadow fading is provided. The additive model is also shown to be supported by radio channel measurements.