Impact of a non-fading Gaussian characterization of interference on portable radio link analysis

In order to make the analytical evaluation of portable radio link performance tractable while avoiding lengthy simulations, intersymbol interference and cochannel interference are often modeled as nonfading, Gaussian noise. The viability of such an approach for wideband channels where equalization and space diversity are used to combat interferences and signal fading is investigated. The analytical results obtained using such a model of interference are compared to those of a semi-analytical approach based on the method of moments and Monte Carlo averaging over the fading statistics. It is shown that as long as the number of cochannel interferers is smaller than the space diversity order, the variance of the Gaussian interfering symbols can be adjusted to provide a reasonable estimate of performance over error rates of interest