The performance of wireless communications systems is affected by many components of the fading phenomenon. These components include clustering, nonlinearity, scattered waves, and line of sight. Even though several fading distributions exist which address a multitude of propagation conditions, in many cases the fading models or the associated system performance cannot be obtained in closed form. Therefore, it proves very hard to understand how each fading component impacts system performance. In this work, we introduce a unified asymptotic characterization at high signal-to-noise ratio to obtain simple, general closed-form expressions for the diversity and coding gains of essential performance metrics: symbol error rate and outage probability. Capitalizing on the fact that the asymptotic channel distribution around the origin fully determines the diversity and coding gains, our results provide new insights into how each fading component ultimately affects the performance of communication systems in fading channels.
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