New Results on Asymptotic Analysis of Digital Communications in Generalized Fading Channels

In this article, we develop new closed-form asymptotic approximations for the average symbol error rate (ASER) and the outage probability performance metrics of digital communication systems impaired by additive white Gaussian noise and fading. Specifically, our expressions generalize some of the known asymptotic results to a wide range of fading environments and digital modulation schemes. We also demonstrate that the consideration of only the first term and/or the first two terms of a Maclaurin series expansion of the probability density function (PDF) of the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) random variable in conjunction with the Mellin transform of the conditional error probability (CEP) formulas may not be sufficient to yield accurate predictions of the ASER performance and/or outage capacity over a wide range of SNR values.