Micro- and macrodiversity NCFSK (DPSK) on shadowed Nakagami-fading channels

The improvements achievable using diversity with matched filter NCFSK (and DPSK) receivers operating on log-normal shadowed Nakagami-fading channels are analyzed. Three microdiversity techniques, equal gain combining (EGC), maximal ratio combining (MRC) and selection combining (SC) are compared. The system performances are assessed by considering two measures of coverage; one well suited for mobile users and one well suited for portable users. The detrimental effects of multipath fading in cellular mobile radio systems can be mitigated by using a number of microdiversity paths at the receiver. The effects of shadowing can be mitigated by using a number K of macrodiversity radio ports to serve each cell. The improvements gained by using microdiversity to combat multipath fading and macrodiversity to combat shadowing are investigated. The effects of the fading severity, the number of microdiversity branches at each port L and the number of macrodiversity ports K on the system performance are investigated in detail. The results, in most cases, are obtained by carrying out a single numerical integration (for any order of diversity). The results show that although MRC gives the best performance, EGC and SC perform nearly as well for dual (L=2) diversity. For larger L, i.e., L⩾4, the relative performance of SC deteriorates substantially whereas the performance of EGC remains close to that of MRC. Also, our results show that as the fading gets less severe, the performance of EGC gets closer to that of MRC, while the performance of SC worsens compared to that of MRC