This paper paves the way when the assumption of normality is challenged within the wireless com- munications systems arena. Innovative results pertaining to the distributions of quadratic forms and their associated eigenvalue density functions for the complex elliptical family are derived, which includes an original Rayleigh-type representation of channels. The presented analytical framework provides computationally convenient forms of these distributions. The results are applied to eval- uate an important information-theoretic measure, namely channel capacity. Superior performance in terms of higher capacity of the wireless channel is obtained when considering the underlying complex matrix variate t distribution compared to the usual complex matrix variate normal as- sumption.

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