Performance of diversity reception over fading channels with impulsive noise

We derive the performance of post-detection-combining (PDC) over Rayleigh fading channels with impulsive noise and compare it with maximum-ratio-combining (MRC). The bit error rates (BER) and simple upper and lower bounds are derived in closed form for the first time in the literature for these two techniques over impulsive noise channels. We show how the impulsive noise deteriorates the performance compared with Gaussian noise. PDC is shown to be more robust to impulsive noise than MRC, especially when the number of antennas is large. Simulation results corroborate our analysis.