ERROR STATISTICS IN DATA-TRANSMISSION OVER FADING CHANNELS

In this paper, we investigate the behavior of block errors which arise in data transmission on fading channels. Our approach takes into acco unt the details of the specific coding/modulation scheme and tracks th e fading process symbol by symbol. It is shown that a Markov approxima tion for the block error process (possibly degenerating into an identi cally distributed (i.i.d,) process for sufficiently fast fading) is a good model fur a broad range of parameters. Also, it is observed that the relationship between the marginal error rate and the transition pr obability is largely insensitive to parameters such as block length, d egree of forward error correction and modulation format, and depends e ssentially on an appropriately normalized version of the Doppler frequ ency. This relationship can therefore be computed in the simple case o f a threshold model and then used more generally as an accurate approx imation. This observation leads to a unified approach for the channel modeling, and to a simplified performance analysis of upper lager prot ocols.