Antenna Array Processing in Fading and Interference: An Interference-Cancellation vs. Diversity Comparative Performance

We provide a comparative performance of two different array processing techniques in a wireless system with multiple receive antennas in fading channels with co-channel interference (CCI). The signal from the desired user at the receive antenna array is assumed to be affected by Rice, Nakagami or Rayleigh fading, while CCI signals are assumed to experience Rayleigh fading. We provide analytical expressions for the outage probability and provide a comparative performance of MRC (to provide diversity) and IC (to cancel the strongest interferers). Our results show that IC yields significantly better performance than MRC if the system is interference-limited and the number of dominant interferers is lower than the number of receive antennas, or when the output SINR is low.