Performance of diversity receivers over non-identical Weibull fading channels

The performance of L-branch equal-gain combining (EGC) and maximal-ratio combining (MRC) receivers operating over correlative, non-identical Weibull fading channels is studied. Closed-form expressions are derived for the moments of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the output of the combiner and important performance criteria, such as average output SNR, amount of fading (AoF) and spectral efficiency (SE) at the low power regime, are extracted. We also evaluate the outage and average symbol error probability (ASEP) for several coherent and non-coherent modulation schemes, using a closed-form expression for the moment generating function (mgf) of the output SNR for MRC receivers and the Pade approximation to the mgf for EGC receivers. The proposed mathematical analysis is complimented by various numerical and computer simulations results, which point out the effects of fading severity and correlation on the overall system performance.