Error modeling schemes for fading channels in wireless communications: A survey

Network system designers need to understand the error performance of wireless mobile channels in order to improve the quality of communications by deploying better modulation and coding schemes, and better network architectures. It is also desirable to have an accurate and thoroughly reproducible error model, which would allow network designers to evaluate a protocol or algorithm and its variations in a controlled and repeatable way. However, the physical properties of radio propagation, and the diversities of error environments in a wireless medium, lead to complexity in modeling the error performance of wireless channels. This article surveys the error modeling methods of fading channels in wireless communications, and provides a novel user-requirement (researchers and designers) based approach to classify the existing wireless error models.