Practical issues in the estimation of Nakagami-m parameter

The Nakagami m parameter is known to capture the envelope distribution of various fading channel conditions in wireless communications. The value of m is indicative of the severity of fading, and is a measure of channel quality, making its estimation necessary. We discuss some practical issues not addressed in the literature including presence of additive noise, adaptation and computational complexity. Moreover, we propose new estimators which are robust to any symmetrically distributed noise with the best performance and lowest complexity among the existing estimators designed for noise immunity. Simulation results corroborate our analysis.