DPSK performance of a coded SSMA system with microdiversity in a Nakagami fading environment

This work considers the performance of direct sequence spread spectrum multiple access (DS/SSMA) transmission with MRC diversity for cellular indoor wireless communication (IWC) channels, although it is not entirely restricted to the IWC channel. The indoor communication channel, which is multipath faded, is modelled by a discrete set of Nakagami faded paths. The Nakagami fading distribution has been shown to fit empirical results more generally than other distributions. New analytical results to evaluate the probability of error for the receiver terminals studied in this work are presented. Numerical results reveal that for nondiversity receivers, Nakagami fading is very hostile to the SSMA signal. However, with the use of MRC diversity, interleaving and convolutional coding, the average error rate can be reduced dramatically, allowing for reliable communication.