Smart antenna performance for correlated azimuth spread Rician K-factor

The recently-proposed superset of statistical beamforming (BF) and maximal-ratio combining (MRC) known as maximal-ratio eigencombining (MREC) promises to achieve near-optimum performance and to reduce numerical complexity. Furthermore, eigencombining can be exploited to greatly simplify the performance analysis of diversity schemes for correlated fading. This paper contributes a new MREC (BF, MRC) performance analysis and evaluation for Rician fading with lognormally-distributed K-factor, and Laplacian power azimuth spectrum with lognormally-distributed azimuth spread (AS). First, an average error probability (AEP) expression is derived for MREC for correlated Rician fading and perfectly known channel gains and eigenstructure. This AEP expression is then employed to study the effect on performance of the randomness of K and of the AS - K correlation. We find that disregarding this randomness and correlation may significantly distort performance indications.