Modeling multipath fading channel dynamics for packet data performance analysis

The multipath fading channel modeling traditionally focuses on physical level dynamics such as signal strength and bit error rate. In this paper we characterize multipath fading channel dynamics at the packet level and analyze the corresponding data queueing performance in various environments. The integration of wireless channel modeling and data queueing analysis provides us a unique way to capture important channel statistics with respect to various wireless network factors such as channel bandwidth, mobile speed and channel coding. The second order channel statistics, i.e. channel power spectrum, is found to play an important role in the modeling of multipath fading channels. The data queueing performance is largely dependent on the interaction between the channel power spectrum and the data arrival power spectrum; whichever has lower frequency power will have more impact on queueing performance. Note that the data arrival power spectrum provides a measure of burstiness and correlation behavior of data packet arrivals. Throughout the paper, we use the Markov chain modeling technique to match the measured important channel statistics for both channel modeling and queueing analysis.