### Rayleigh fading is the name given to the form of fading that is often experienced in an environment where there is a large number of reflections present.

The Rayleigh fading model uses a statistical approach to analyse the propagation, and can be used in a number of environments.

The Rayleigh fading model is ideally suited to situations where there are large numbers of signal paths and reflections. Typical scenarios include cellular telecommunications where there are large number of reflections from buildings and the like and also HF ionospheric communications where the uneven nature of the ionosphere means that the overall signal can arrive having taken many different paths.

The Rayleigh fading model is also appropriate for for tropospheric radio propagation because, again there are many reflection points and the signal may follow a variety of different paths.

The Rayleigh fading model may be defined as follow:

• Rayleigh fading model:   Rayleigh fading models assume that the magnitude of a signal that has passed through such a transmission medium (also called a communications channel) will vary randomly, or fade, according to a Rayleigh distribution — the radial component of the sum of two uncorrelated Gaussian random variables.