Average Error Rates for Equal Gain Combining Schemes in Nakagami Fading Channels with Arbitrary Fading Parameters

Conference: European Wireless 2005 - 11th European Wireless Conference 2005 - Next Generation wireless and Mobile Communications and Services
04/10/2006 - 04/13/2005 at Nicosia, Cyprus

Proceedings: European Wireless 2005

Pages: 5Language: englishTyp: PDF

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Authors:
Aalo, Valentine A.; Piboongungon, Terawat (Department of Electrical Engineering, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL 33431, USA)
Efthymoglou, George P. (Department of Technology Education and Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, 18534, Greece)

Abstract:
Equal gain combining (EGC) is employed in many practical wireless communication systems to combat fading and interference due to its simplicity. However, although EGC is easy to implement, its performance is usually very difficult to evaluate. This difficulty stems from the fact that it is usually not easy to express the probability density function (pdf) of the sum of independent Nakagami-m distributed random variables in closed-form. In this paper, we derive an expression for the pdf of the sum of independent Nakagami random variables in terms of multivariate hypergeometric function. Consequently, we express the average error rate of several digital modulation schemes at the output of the EGC in terms of the well known multivariate Lauricella function.