MDPSK on shadowed frequency-selective channels with micro- and macro-diversity

The performance of M-ary differential phase shift keying (MDPSK) with diversity combining on frequency-selective slow Rayleigh fading, lognormal shadowed channels is analyzed. The use of EG postdetection microdiversity combining to mitigate the effects of fading and the use of macrodiversity to alleviate the effects of shadowing are investigated. Four performance criteria are considered. These are: the short term BER for a frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channel; the irreducible BER; the mobile outage probability; and the quasistatic outage probability. For the same information throughput, it is seen that, in most cases, 4 DPSK gives the best performance followed by 8 DPSK and 2 DPSK, respectively. The BER and the outage performance results show that diversity combining is an effective method for improving the system performance, and hence system reliability