Performance of TAS/MRC Wireless Systems Under Hoyt Fading Channels

This paper presents the performance analysis of a wireless system with multiple transmit and receive antennas under Hoyt fading. Receive antennas are assumed to perform Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC), whereas the antenna at the transmit end that maximizes the instantaneous output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is selected for transmission. When the number of receive antennas is arbitrary, an exact compact expression is derived for the outage probability. For two receive antennas, closed-form expressions are presented for the ergodic capacity and the average error rates of different modulations, which are given as a finite sum of well known functions. An asymptotic error rate analysis is also performed when the number of receive antennas is arbitrary. It is shown that severe fading conditions do not always degrade wireless systems performance. Actually, our results show that severe fading can be beneficial in terms of channel capacity if the transmit array is large enough due to the antenna selection performed at the transmitter. Monte Carlo simulations have been carried out to validate the derived expressions, showing an excellent agreement with the analytical results.