Average Finite-Blocklength Packet Error Rate over Nakagami-$m$ Fading via a Logistic--Lerch Approximation

Abstract

Evaluating the average packet error rate (PER) of finite-blocklength (FBL) coded transmission over fading requires integrating the block-error waterfall, given by the normal approximation, against the fading distribution, which is intractable for general Nakagami-$m$ channels. This letter approximates the conditional waterfall by a slope-matched logistic function and shows that its Nakagami-$m$ average reduces to a single Lerch-transcendent term that interpolates between the FBL waterfall and the classical outage limit, with norming constants explicit in rate and blocklength. The closed form supports non-integer fading and, composed into an effective-capacity objective, yields a quality-of-service (QoS) aware rate-selection rule. It matches the normal-approximation integral to about 1\% uniformly in $m$ over the nominal FBL operating region, while outage and linearization baselines exceed several percent at high diversity.

5 Pages. Accepted for publication in IEEE Wireless Communications Letters