On the Level Crossing Rate and Average Fade Duration of Composite Multipath/Shadowing Channels

In this paper, we consider composite multipath/shadowing fading channels characterized by Nakagami- m fading with inverse Gaussian shadowing, and Rice fading with inverse Gaussian shadowing. These channel models are very convenient for land mobile satellite systems and communications with low mobility or stationary users. From an analytical standpoint, one major advantage of these models is that they lead to closed-from expressions for the envelope probability density function (pdf) and the cumulative density function (CDF). Moreover, in this paper, we derive mathematically tractable new expressions for fundamental channel statistics such as the level crossing rate (LCR) and the average fade duration (AFD). Also, we validate our analytical results by providing several numerical examples showing the LCR and the AFD as a function of the Nakagami-m factor, Rice factor, and shadowing spread.