Comparison of the level crossing rate and average fade duration of Rayleigh, Rice and Nakagami fading models with mobile channel data

Level crossing rate (LCR) and average fade duration (AFD) of the signal envelope are two important second-order channel statistics, which convey useful information about the dynamic temporal behavior of multipath fading channels. In this paper and for a general non-isotropic scattering scenario, in which the mobile receives signal only from particular directions with different probabilities, we derive expressions for the LCR and AFD of Rayleigh, Rice and Nakagami (1960) fading models, including the effect of non-uniform signal angle-of-arrival distribution. The merits and limitations of all the above models in describing the first- and second-order statistics of multipath fading channels are explored through an extensive comparison of theoretical results with narrowband measurements taken in urban and suburban areas at 910.25 MHz.