The alpha-k-μ Shadowed fading distribution: Statistical characterization and applications

We introduce the /spl alpha/-/spl kappa/-/spl mu/ shadowed (/spl alpha/-KMS) fading distribution as a natural generalization of the versatile /spl alpha/-/spl kappa/-/spl mu/ and /spl alpha/-/spl eta/-/spl mu/distributions. The /spl alpha/-KMS fading distribution unifies a wide set of fading distributions, as it includes the /spl alpha/-/spl kappa/-/spl mu/, /spl alpha/-/spl eta/-/spl mu/, /spl alpha/-/spl mu/, Weibull, /spl kappa/-/spl mu/ shadowed, Rician shadowed, /spl kappa/-/spl mu/ and /spl eta/-/spl mu/ distributions as special cases, together with classical models like Rice, Nakagami-m, Hoyt, Rayleigh and one-sided Gaussian. Notably, the /spl alpha/-KMS distribution reduces to a finite mixture of /spl alpha/-/spl mu/ distributions when the fading parameters /spl mu/ and m take positive integer values, so that performance analysis over /spl alpha/- KMS fading channels can be tackled by leveraging previous (existing) results in the literature for the simpler /spl alpha/-spl mu/ case. As application examples, important performance metrics like the outage probability and average channel capacity are analyzed.