The stability of the spatial information transmission in communication is very important, and the ghost imaging mechanism has shown advantages in resistance to the external interference factors and in the low-light detection. A Rician fading channel typically describes the environment with a direct path and an infinite number of multi-path scatters, and the channel quality could be directly reflected by the estimation of the Rician factor. We propose a theoretical model of ghost imaging in a Rician fading channel with additive random noise. By calculating the peak signal-to-noise ratio and the resolution, the impact of the path loss and the Rician distribution on the imaging quality are numerically investigated. In addition, the comparative studies between the traditional non-correlated imaging and ghost imaging under the same conditions are also discussed, and it is shown that ghost imaging technique presents higher robustness and longer transmission distance. Our results establish a link between communication channels and ghost imaging, and provide reference and guidance for the spatial information transmission through a Rician fading channel.