The recently introduced independent fluctuating two-ray (IFTR) fading model, consisting of two specular components fluctuating independently plus a diffuse component, has proven to provide an excellent fit to different wireless environments, including the millimeter-wave band. However, the original formulations of the probability density function (PDF) and cumulative distribution function (CDF) of this model are not applicable to all possible values of its defining parameters, and are given in terms of multifold generalized hypergeometric functions, which prevents their widespread use for the derivation of performance metric expressions. A new formulation of the IFTR model is here presented as a countable mixture of Gamma distributions which greatly facilitates the performance evaluation for this model in terms of the metrics already known for the much simpler and widely used Nakagami-mfading, and is shown to provide a better fit to empirical measurements than the original formulation. Additionally, a closed-form expression is presented for the generalized moment generating function (GMGF), which permits to readily obtain all the moments of the distribution of the model, as well as several relevant performance metrics. Based on these new derivations, performance results are presented for the IFTR model considering different metrics, which are verified by Monte Carlo simulations.

This paper investigates the theoretical basis for using ground relaying in multi-antenna satellites exposed to blocking situations. Inactive and unobstructed User Equipments (UEs) located on the ground are the relaying nodes of UEs that are not in the satellite’s field of view. Exact closed-form relationships of the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and the outage probability are obtained for the case where each user is connected to two transmitting antennas at the satellite. The channel between the satellite and ground is modeled as a shadowed-Rician (SR), whereas a Fluctuating Two-Ray (FTR) fading model is used for the mmWaves ground link between relay and UE, as well as cases with perfect and imperfect Channel State Information (CSI). The simulation results showed that if perfect CSI is not available in the pre-coding and only the signal phase is estimated, the performance loss is minimal and the system can reach its ideal performance by spending limited power. In any case, the closed-forms for the ideal state are a good proxy to predict the performance under non-ideal conditions.

Fluctuating two-ray (FTR) channel model was shown to effectively characterize millimeter wave (mmWave) communication channels. In this article, we adopt FTR to investigate amplify-and-Forward (AF) mmWave relaying system. Two communications scenarios are considered corresponding to the presence and absence of a direct link between the transmitter and receiver. Outage probability and symbol error rate (SER) are then analytically obtained as performance metrics. The results are further compared with the corresponding metrics obtained based on conventional channel models including Nakagami-m and two-wave with diffuse power (TWDP). Especially, for the high-SNR regime, our analyses indicate that performance evaluations based on the conventional models significantly deviate from that of based on the FTR model. Our results provide quantitative insights on the importance of model selection in design and performance evaluations of relay-based mmWave systems. Moreover, for the high-SNR regime, we carry out asymptotic analysis and obtain a low-complexity expression for the achieved AF relaying gain. Such an expression provides a quantitative measure on whether or not AF relaying outperforms no-relaying in a given setting. Extensive numerical and simulation results are provided to confirm the accuracy of the analysis and investigate system performance in different settings.