Tight Bounds and Invertible Average Error Probability Expressions over Composite Fading Channels

The focus in this paper is on obtaining tight, simple algebraic-form bounds and invertible expressions for the average symbol error probability (ASEP) of M-ary phase shift keying (MPSK) in a class of composite fading channels. We employ the mixture gamma (MG) distribution to approximate the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) distributions of fading models, which include Nakagami-m, Generalized-K ($K_G$), and Nakagami-lognormal fading as specific examples. Our approach involves using the tight upper and lower bounds that we recently derived on the Gaussian Q-function, which can easily be averaged over the general MG distribution. First, algebraic-form upper bounds are derived on the ASEP of MPSK for M > 2, based on the union upper bound on the symbol error probability (SEP) of MPSK in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) given by a single Gaussian Q-function. By comparison with the exact ASEP results obtained by numerical integration, we show that these upper bounds are extremely tight for all SNR values of practical interest. These bounds can be employed as accurate approximations that are invertible for high SNR. For the special case of binary phase shift keying (BPSK) (M = 2), where the exact SEP in the AWGN channel is given as one Gaussian Q-function, upper and lower bounds on the exact ASEP are obtained. The bounds can be made arbitrarily tight by adjusting the parameters in our Gaussian bounds. The average of the upper and lower bounds gives a very accurate approximation of the exact ASEP. Moreover, the arbitrarily accurate approximations for all three of the fading models we consider become invertible for reasonably high SNR.