A Simple Method for the Performance Analysis of Fluid Antenna Systems under Correlated Nakagami-$m$ Fading

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple, accurate method for analyzing the performance of fluid antenna systems in correlated Nakagami-m fading channels, demonstrating their potential to outperform traditional MRC techniques.

Contribution

It develops a novel asymptotic matching method for closed-form approximation of FAS performance metrics, reducing computational complexity significantly.

Findings

FAS can match or outperform MRC in fading channels.

The proposed method provides highly accurate outage probability estimates.

Computational effort is greatly reduced compared to traditional methods.

Abstract

By recognizing the tremendous flexibility of the emerging fluid antenna system (FAS), which allows dynamic reconfigurability of the location of the antenna within a given space, this paper investigates the performance of a single-antenna FAS over spatially correlated Nakagami-$m$ fading channels. Specifically, simple and highly accurate closed-form approximations for the cumulative density function of the FAS channel and the outage probability of the proposed system are obtained by employing a novel asymptotic matching method, which is an improved version of the well-known moment matching. With this method, the outage probability can be computed {simply} without incurring complex multi-fold integrals, thus requiring negligible computational effort. Finally, the accuracy of the proposed approximations is validated, and it is shown that the FAS can meet or even exceed the performance attained by the conventional maximal ratio combining (MRC) technique.