Hotellings generalized distribution and performance of 2D-RAKE receivers

Two-dimensional (2D) RAKE (2D-RAKE) receivers process signals in both time and space to improve the performance of code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems. We establish the connection between the 2D-RAKE signal-to-interference-ratio (SIR) output statistics and the generalized Hotellingʹs (1947, 1951, 1931) T/sup 2//sub 0/ (in the complex case) distribution. We study this distribution and offer new simple explicit closed-form expressions (in terms of hypergeometric functions) for its probability density function (PDF) and cumulative distribution function (CDF). Based on that, we derive the outage probability of dual-branch 2D-RAKE receivers over Rayleigh-fading channels. Some numerical examples for particular cases of interests are plotted and discussed.