Abstract:Harnessing diversity is fundamental to wireless communication systems, particularly in the terahertz (THz) band, where severe path loss and small-scale fading pose significant challenges to system reliability and performance. In this paper, we present a comprehensive diversity analysis for indoor THz communication systems, accounting for the combined effects of path loss and small-scale fading, with the latter modeled as an $\alpha-\mu$ distribution to reflect THz indoor channel conditions. We derive closed-form expressions for the bit error rate (BER) as a function of the reciprocal of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and propose an asymptotic expression. Furthermore, we validate these expressions through extensive simulations, which show strong agreement with the theoretical analysis, confirming the accuracy and robustness of the proposed methods. Our results show that the diversity order in THz systems is primarily determined by the combined effects of the number of independent paths, the severity of fading, and the degree of channel frequency selectivity, providing clear insights into how diversity gains can be optimized in high-frequency wireless networks.
Abstract:We study the rate-distortion problem for both scalar and vector memoryless heavy-tailed $\alpha$-stable sources ($0 < \alpha < 2$). Using a recently defined notion of ``strength" as a power measure, we derive the rate-distortion function for $\alpha$-stable sources subject to a constraint on the strength of the error, and show it to be logarithmic in the strength-to-distortion ratio. We showcase how our framework paves the way to finding optimal quantizers for $\alpha$-stable sources and more generally to heavy-tailed ones. In addition, we study high-rate scalar quantizers and show that uniform ones are asymptotically optimal under the strength measure. We compare uniform Gaussian and Cauchy quantizers and show that more representation points for the Cauchy source are required to guarantee the same quantization quality. Our findings generalize the well-known rate-distortion and quantization results of Gaussian sources ($\alpha = 2$) under a quadratic distortion measure.