Performance analysis of maximal ratio combining over shadowed-Rice fading channels

An accurate model for analyzing the performance of wireless land mobile satellite (LMS) communication systems is the shadowed-Rice (SR) fading model. In this paper, new simple expressions for the probability density function (PDF) and the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the sum of possibly correlated non identically distributed squared SR random variables are derived. To this end, a novel approach is introduced for Laplace inverting the moment generating function (MGF) of the sum. Based on this approach the PDF is expressed in a simple infinite chi-squared series form, from which the CDF is also easily obtained. The derived statistics are used to analyze the performance of maximal ratio combining (MRC) over SR fading channels and novel closed-form expressions for various performance criteria such as the outage probability, the ergodic capacity and the bit error probability (BEP) are developed. The results of extensive Monte Carlo simulations are presented, which corroborate our theoretical analysis.