Coherent multichannel reception of binary modulated signals with dependent Rician fading

A novel technique to calculate the BER of a q-branch coherent receiver for an antipodal binary modulated transmitted signal is described. When the amplitude fading on each branch is Rician and independent, the BER is calculated through simplification of a (q-1)-dimensional integral down to a one-dimensional integral, which is readily amenable to numerical evaluation. For systems where the Rician fading on the branches is dependent, it is shown that the problem can be transformed to an independent fading problem using the technique of `spatial whitening´. The authors apply the results to construct diversity contours for the analysis of dependent Rician faded channel data