Precise information of wind speed probability distribution is truly significant for many wind energy applications. The objective of this study is to evaluate the suitability of different probability functions for estimating wind speed distribution at five stations, distributed in the east and southeast of Iran. Nakagami distribution function is utilized for the first time to estimate the distribution of wind speed. The performance of Nakagami function is compared with seven typically used distribution functions. The achieved results reveal that the more effective function is not similar among all stations. Wind speed characteristics, quantity and quality of the recorded wind speed data can be considered as influential parameters on the performance of the distribution functions. Also, the skewness of the recorded wind speed data may have influence on the accuracy of the Nakagami distribution. For Chabahar and Khaf stations the Nakagami distribution shows the highest performance while for Lutak, Rafsanjan and Zabol stations the Gamma, Generalized Extreme Value and Inverse-Gaussian distributions offer the best fits, respectively. Based on the analysis, the Nakagami distribution can generally be considered as an effective distribution since it provides the best fits in 2 stations and ranks 3rd to 5th in the remaining stations; however, due to the close performance of the Nakagami and Weibull distributions and also flexibility of the Weibull function as its widely proven feature, more assessments on the performance of the Nakagami distribution are required. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.