Two Main Types of Fading in Mobile Communication Systems

Mobile communication systems primarily experience two types of fading: large-scale fading and small-scale fading. Large-scale fading represents the reduction in average signal energy or path loss due to movement over large distances. Small-scale fading manifests through two mechanisms: signal delay spread and time-varying channel characteristics. For wireless applications, time-varying channel properties result from changes in transmission paths due to relative movement between transmitters and receivers. The rate of these propagation condition changes affects the fading rate. When numerous reflective paths exist without a line-of-sight component, this small-scale fading is termed Rayleigh fading, where the received signal envelope follows Rayleigh probability distribution statistics. This experiment will focus on analyzing this specific fading phenomenon with signal processing implementations.