Asymptotic performance of M-ary orthogonal modulation in generalized fading channels

The asymptotic (M→∞) probability of symbol error P_e,_m for M-ary orthogonal modulation in a Nakagami-m fading channel is given by the incomplete gamma function P(m, mx) where x=In 2/(E_b/N₀) and E_b is the average energy per bit. For large signal-to-noise ratio this leads to a channel where the probability of symbol error varies as the inverse mth power of E_b/N₀. These channels exist for all m⩾1/2. The special case of m=1 corresponds to Rayleigh fading, an inverse linear channel