Suitability of α-μ for Composite Fading Modeling

This work compares the statistical fitting performance of the fading models α-μ, Nakagami-Lognormal, Generalized-K, and Fisher-Snedecor, to field measurements conducted at 1.8 GHz in a composite fading environment. The aim is to investigate whether a substantially easily computable, simpler model, namely α-μ, can be used instead of more intricate ones, namely, Nakagami-Lognormal, Generalized-K, and Fisher-Snedecor, the former first explicitly derived for that scenario and the latter three obtained as an approximation of it. The comparison uses metrics such as normalized mean square error (NMSE) and the modified Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (modified K-S). In overwhelmed cases, α-μ. outperformed all the other models or, otherwise, gave a comparable performance.