Characterization of multipath fading channels: channels with specular components

A set of parameters collectively called recentered normalized mean square correlation (RC-NMSR) are introduced to characterize the quality of multipath fading channels with nonzero specular components. The consideration of nonzero specular components requires nontrivial generalization of the parameters previously introduced for wide-sense stationary uncorrelated scattering (WSSUS) channels. The new parameters are obtained by studying the principles of diversity combining. We illustrate the effectiveness of these parameters by theoretical and empirical study of a simple diversity combining scheme and frequency hopping spread spectrum systems.