Fading-Averaged Symbol Error Probability Analysis of Millimeter Wave Downlink over Nakagami Fading

Abstract

Millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) communication links have been modeled and investigated in the literature, given its importance and advantages in the fifth-generation (5G) networks. Analytical modeling of a mm-Wave link is challenging due to the gigahertz (GHz) frequency band complications that arise during the transmission as well as the reception. We consider and model a mm-Wave downlink to investigate its symbol error probability (SEP), a significant link reliability measure. We derive the analytical expressions for fading-averaged SEP for three analytically rich scenarios: i). SEP as a function of signal power to noise power ratio, ii). SEP as a function of signal power to interference power ratio, and iii). SEP as a function of the signal power to interference power plus noise power ratio. In addition to insightful analysis, we numerically evaluate the SEP performance in the scenarios mentioned above. SEP performance analysis and numerical results that we present are useful to investigate more complex and generalized mm-Wave communication systems further.