Effective capacity of a correlated Nakagami‐m fading channel

The grail of next‐generation wireless networks is providing real‐time services for delay‐sensitive applications, which require that the wireless networks provide QoS guarantees. The effective capacity (EC) proposed by Wu and Negi provides a powerful tool for design of QoS provisioning mechanisms. In this paper, we intend to generalize their formula for the effective capacity of a correlated Rayleigh fading channel; specifically, we derive a closed form approximate EC formula for a special correlated Nakagami‐m fading channel, for which the inverse of the correlation coefficient matrix is tridiagonal. To verify its accuracy via simulation, we develop a Green‐matrix based approach, which allows us to analytically obtain the effective capacity (given the joint probability density function of a correlated Nakagami‐m fading channel) while being able to simulate the corresponding channel gain process. Simulation results show that our EC formula is accurate. Furthermore, to facilitate the application of the EC theory to the design of practical QoS provisioning mechanisms, we propose a simple algorithm for estimating the EC of an arbitrary correlated Nakagami‐m fading channel, given channel measurements; simulation results demonstrate the accuracy of our proposed EC estimation algorithm showing its suitability in practice. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.