Dual diversity combining and equalization in digital cellular mobile radio

The performance of digital data transmission over frequency-selective fading channels is investigated. For statistically independent diversity paths, estimates of average attainable error rates and outage probabilities as functions of system parameters are provided. The dependences among the important system parameters are exhibited graphically for several examples, including quaternary phase-shift keying (QPSK). In the optimized uncoded QPSK with 1.5 b/s/Hz, two orders of magnitude in outage probability can be gained by diversity reception. When one compares the uncoded average probability of error for the optimized mean squared error (MSE) systems one finds at most an order-of-magnitude difference among the different equalizers investigated except for the zero-forcing equalizer, whose performance is drastically inferior to the others. Again, dual diversity can provide two orders of magnitude improvement in the average error rate or in outage probability for the uncoded optimized systems