Fading, defined as the rapid variation of received SNR, resulting from the constructive

and destructive combination of rapidly changing phases of multipath signals. The effect
of multipath at the receiver can be viewed in figure (a). Critical to the success of any
wireless system design is the modeling of its channel to depict fading.

Figure (a)

Rayleigh and Rician channel characterizations are used to model wireless channel that
have the effect of fading. Figure b & c shows the channel characterization of Rayleigh
and Rician respectively.

Rayleigh channel characterization model depict the worst case scenario that a wireless
system can operate; there is no Line of Sight (LoS), and the signal received are results of
reflection from obstacle to the LoS signal.

Figure (b)
Figure (c)

Mathematically the Rayleigh model can be represented as the phasor sum of two random
variables with mean zero and variance σ2. The square of the phaor sum gives an
exponential decay as shown in equation (g).