The University of British Columbia

In performance analyses of wireless communication systems, expressions for the probability distributions of certain random variables are often needed. While exact, efficiently computable closed-form expressions are desirable, they are often very difficult, if at all possible, to obtain. In this paper, the Pearson system of distributions is studied as a means to obtain approximate expressions for such distributions. The usefulness of this approach is illustrated for a number of diversity techniques employed on Nakagami and Weibull fading channels. The resulting relatively simple approximations are shown to be very accurate