AbstractThe next generation wireless networks call for quality of service (QoS) support. The effective capacity (EC) proposed by Wu and Negi provides a powerful tool for the design of QoS provisioning mechanisms. In their previous work, Wu and Negi derived a formula for effective capacity of a Rayleigh fading channel with arbitrary Doppler spectrum. However, their paper did not provide simulation results to verify the accuracy of the EC formula derived in their paper. This is due to difficulty in simulating a Rayleigh fading channel with a Doppler spectrum of continuous frequency, required by the EC formula. To address this difficulty, we develop a verification methodology based on a new discrete‐frequency EC formula; different from the EC formula developed by Wu and Negi, our new discrete‐frequency EC formula can be used in practice. Through simulation, we verify that the EC formula developed by Wu and Negi is accurate. Furthermore, to facilitate the application of the EC theory to the design of practical QoS provisioning mechanisms in wireless networks, we propose a spectral‐estimation‐based algorithm to estimate the EC function, given channel measurements; we also analyze the effect of spectral estimation error on the accuracy of EC estimation. Simulation results show that our proposed spectral‐estimation‐based EC estimation algorithm is accurate, indicating the excellent practicality of our algorithm. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.