Abstract:
This paper paves the way when the assumption of normality is challenged within the
wireless communications systems arena. Innovative results pertaining to the distributions of quadratic forms and their associated eigenvalue density functions for the
complex elliptical family are derived, which includes an original Rayleigh-type representation of channels. The presented analytical framework provides computationally
convenient forms of these distributions. The results are applied to evaluate an important information-theoretic measure, namely channel capacity. Superior performance
in terms of higher capacity of the wireless channel is obtained when considering the
underlying complex matrix variate t distribution compared to the usual complex matrix variate normal assumption.