BER performance of DQPSK in Nakagami fading with selection diversity and maximal-ratio combining

A new expression for the average bit-error rate (BER) of differential quadrature phase-shift keying in slow frequency-nonselective Nakagami fading is derived for a space-diversity receiver having a cascade arrangement of L groups of M-branch selection combiners and an L-branch maximal-ratio combiner (MRC). This allows the use of a large number of antennas, for performance improvement, and a small number of M inputs to the combiners, for low complexity. The average BER performance of the cascade receiver is investigated for different fading severity conditions characterized by the Nakagami m factor, and compared with the conventional MRC receiver. As the fading gets less severe (m increases), performance improvement over the conventional MRC scheme is only noticeable for the larger range of average signal-to-noise ratio.