Performance of MIMO MRC Systems with Co-Channel Interference

We determine exact closed-form expressions for the outage probability of multiple-input/multiple-output systems in Rayleigh fading with maximal ratio diversity combining and co-channel interference. Our analysis generalizes prior work in that we place no restrictions on the number or power of the interferers, or on the number of antennas at the transmitter and receiver. We also present an alternative mathematical approach to performance analysis that leads to an undemanding expression for the SINR moment generating function, which can then be used to evaluate average probability of error and the moments of the SINR. Our numerical results indicate that, for a fixed total interference power, system performance degrades when there are dominant interferers. In addition, for a fixed total number of transmit and receive antennas, outage probability and average bit error rate decrease when the transmitter and receiver have the same number of antennas.