Performance Analysis of Land Mobile Satellite Communication Systems with Equal-Gain Combining over Shadowed-Rice Fading Channels

An accurate model for performance analysis of land mobile satellite (LMS) channels is the Shadowed-Rice (SR) fading model. Recently, an approximate SR model has been proposed by the author for LMS channels. Compared with the existing models, the proposed model is analytically tractable and makes it possible to approximate very accurately the probability density function (PDF) of the SR random variable (RV) by a finite weighted sum of Rice PDFs. In this paper and based on the proposed model, the statistics of the sum of independent SR RVs is studied. While this problem is well understood for common fading models such as the Rayleigh, Rice, and Nakagami, a minor attention has been devoted to the SR case. In this paper and by using the well-known Beaulieu series approach, the PDF and the Cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the sum of independent SR RVs are derived in the form of infinite convergent series. In this regard, analytical, closed-form expressions are derived for the coefficients of the Beaulieu series. To give an application of the presented results, the performance of LMS communication system employing equal-gain combining (EGC) diversity techniques over SR fading channel is investigated and novel closed-form expression is derived for the outage probability of the system.