  We present two alternative formulations for the distribution of the
fluctuating two-ray (FTR) fading model, which simplify its statistical
characterization and subsequent use for performance evaluation. New expressions
for the probability density function (PDF) and cumulative distribution function
of the FTR model are obtained based on the observation that the FTR fading
distribution is described, for arbitrary $m$, as an underlying Rician Shadowed
(RS) distribution with continuously varying parameter $K$, while for the
special case of $m$ being an integer, the FTR fading model is described in
terms of a finite number of underlying squared Nakagami-$m$ distributions. It
is shown that the chief statistics and any performance metric that are computed
by averaging over the PDF of the FTR fading model can be expressed in terms of
a finite-range integral over the corresponding statistic or performance metric
for the RS (for arbitrary $m$) or the Nakagami-$m$ (for integer $m$) fading
models, which have a simpler analytical characterization than the FTR model and
for which many results are available in closed-form. New expressions for some
Laplace-domain statistics of interest are also obtained; these are used to
exemplify the practical relevance of this new formulation for performance
analysis.
