The capacity of the cascaded fading channel in the low power regime

In this paper, we present a simple way to compute the ergodic capacity of cascaded channels with perfect channel state information at both the transmitter and the receiver. We apply our generic results to the Rayleigh-double fading channel, and to the free-space optical channel in the presence of pointing errors and we express their low signal-to-noise ratio capacities. We mainly focus on the low signal-to-noise ratio range.