On the design of Markov models for fading channels

Recent work on the performance characterization of communication systems operating over correlated fading channels has largely concluded that modeling a mobile radio channel as a first-order Markov process is sufficient. In this paper, a new performance criterion that is directly related to the error probability of a communication system is introduced. This criterion suggests that employing a Markov model of higher order will greatly improve the accuracy of model-based performance characterizations. Next, two design techniques for higher-order Markov models are considered. Numerical results suggest that, with no increase in complexity, the use of a second-order Markov model significantly improves the accuracy of characterizing the performance of systems operating over fading channels