Probability of error and outage in a Rice-lognormal channel for terrestrial and satellite personal communications

This letter addresses performance evaluation in a nonselective fading channel modeled by a combination of Rice and lognormal (RLN) statistics. The RLN model is valid under widely different environmental conditions, both for terrestrial cellular and for satellite personal communication systems. The letter provides semianalytical expressions for the average error probability in the RLN channel for coherent M-ary phase shift keying (PSK) and noncoherent M-ary orthogonal transmissions, then it highlights the relationship between outage probability and cell coverage for macro and microcellular systems, and finally it provides some error probability results for nongeostationary (non-GEO) satellite systems.