Efficient generation of correlated Nakagami fading channels with arbitrary fading parameter

Correlated Nakagami-m fading is commonly encountered in wireless communications. Its generation in a laboratory environment is therefore of theoretical and practical importance. However, no generic technique for this purpose is available in the literature except for the simplest case of correlated Rayleigh fading. In this paper, by introducing a direct-sum decomposition principle and determining the statistical mapping between the correlated Nakagami (1960) process and a set of Gaussian vectors for its generation, a simple general procedure is derived for the generation of correlated Nakagami channels with arbitrary parameters. The validity of the new technique is examined through the generation of a correlated Nakagami sequence, as encountered in US digital cellular, and a multibranch vector channel as encountered in diversity reception.