MIMO receiver diversity in general fading

There have recently been a large number of papers that derive the diversity order of various, low complexity, suboptimal receiver structures for MIMO communications. In almost all analyses the MIMO channel is assumed to be i.i.d. Rayleigh fading. It is of interest to investigate how these results generalize to other fading models (e.g., correlated Ricean fading). We show in this paper that the diversity achieved by virtually any receiver is preserved within a very general class of fading models (including i.i.d. Rayleigh fading and correlated Ricean fading). This result obviates the need to recalculate the diversity of various receivers for different fading distributions in a piecemeal fashion.