Extremely efficient acceptance-rejection method for simulating uncorrelated Nakagami fading channels

Multipath fading is one of the most common distortions in wireless communications. The simulation of a fading channel typically requires drawing samples from a Rayleigh, Rice or Nakagami distribution. The Nakagami-m distribution is particularly important due to its good agreement with empirical channel measurements, as well as its ability to generalize the well-known Rayleigh and Rice distributions. In this paper, a simple and extremely efficient rejection sampling (RS) algorithm for generating independent samples from a Nakagami-m distribution is proposed. This RS approach is based on a novel hat function composed of three pieces of well-known densities from which samples can be drawn easily and efficiently. The proposed method is valid for any combination of parameters of the Nakagami distribution, without any restriction in the domain and without requiring any adjustment from the final user. Simulations for several parameter combinations show that the proposed approach attains acceptance rates above 90% in all cases, outperforming all the RS techniques currently available in the literature.