A Gaussian Copula Approach to the Performance Analysis of Fluid Antenna Systems

This paper investigates the performance of a singleuser fluid antenna system (FAS), by exploiting a class of elliptical copulas to describe the structure of dependency amongst the fluid antenna ports. By expressing Jakes' model in terms of the Gaussian copula, we consider two cases: (i) the general case, i.e., any arbitrary correlated fading distribution; and (ii) the specific case, i.e., correlated Nakagami-m fading. For both scenarios, we first derive analytical expressions for the cumulative distribution function (CDF) and probability density function (PDF) of the equivalent channel in terms of multivariate normal distribution. Then, we obtain the outage probability (OP) and the delay outage rate (DOR) to analyze the performance of the FAS. By employing the popular rank correlation coefficients such as Spearman's \{rho} and Kendall's {\tau}, we measure the degree of dependency in correlated arbitrary fading channels and illustrate how the Gaussian copula can be accurately connected to Jakes' model in FAS without complicated mathematical analysis. Numerical results show that increasing the fluid antenna size provides lower OP and DOR, but the system performance saturates as the number of antenna ports increases. In addition, our results indicate that FAS provides better performance compared to conventional single-fixed antenna systems even when the size of fluid antenna is small.