Receive Diversity Revisited: Correlation, Coupling and Noise

Previous studies of receive diversity have carefully modeled the impact of spatial correlation and antenna coupling on the signal component at the receiver. By contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to noise. In this paper we introduce a receive diversity model that articulates the dominant physical noise sources and relates their spatial correlation to the properties of the antennas, front-end amplifiers and matching networks. We then derive an optimal receiver as well as a formula for the resulting outage probability in terms of these noise sources. Numerical results are presented which suggest that different noise sources can impact performance in profoundly different ways.