The α-F Composite Distribution with Pointing Errors: Characterization, Performance and Applications
Pointing errors, α-F distribution, performance metrics, RIS, cascaded, sum of cascaded and NOMA.
The composite fading distribution α-F with pointing errors is proposed in this work. New expressions for the probability density function and cumulative distribution function of the envelope/instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), higher-order moments, and moment generation function of the instantaneous SNR are derived. Based on the above-mentioned statistics, expressions for the outage probability, symbol error probability, and ergodic channel capacity are obtained. The asymptotic analyses are also provided. Several scenarios were studied, such as the application of the α-F model with pointing errors in an emerging wireless system, i.e., reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), a Cascaded and Sum of Cascaded scenario, which refers to multiple signal relay stations, and a scenario using non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), facilitating access to many users. Several curves, corroborated by Monte Carlo simulations, are presented for different values that characterize the channel parameters and pointing error.