On understanding the nature of slow fading in LOS microcellular channels

Our investigations in understanding the physical mechanism of the LOS microcellular channel reveal that the principle source of slow fading is the random interference pattern of a few strong contributing paths which causes what we term as deceptive shadowing. It is shown that in a comparative curve fitting of slow fading, Nakagami distribution also fits the fading data. Also in non-zero mean complex Gaussian channels, the segregation of slow and fast fading using moving mean normalization is illusionary as the fading parameters in both cases remain the same. We argue that radio link performance calculation based on the segregation of slow and fast fading are therefore unnecessary for Rice/lognormal or Nakagami/lognormal fading models and may be avoided in order to simplify complex analyses.