The transmission quality in mobile wireless communication systems is affected by not only AWGN but also multi-path fading. Particularly, the Doppler frequency, the delay spread and the Rician factor have a great influence upon the quality over fading channels. This letter proposes the approximate equation for easily calculating the BER in DS-CDMA systems over multi-path fading channels. The validity of the approximate equation is confirmed from the fact that the BER calculated by the equation coincides with that by the computer simulation.

The Rician factor is an important parameter in evaluating the outage probability and reuse distance of cellular systems. From the measurement of 1. 8 GHz radio propagation in outdoor urban microcells, it is found that the measured pdf of the Rician factor for low tier systems follows a lognormal distribution and the factor is independent on the propagation distance.