Performance of Optimum and Suboptimum Combining Diversity Reception for Binary and Quadrature DPSK Over Independent, Nonidentical Rayleigh Fading Channels

This paper is concerned with the error-performance analysis of binary and quadrature differential phase-shift keying with differential detection over the nonselective, Rayleigh fading channel with combining diversity reception. The diversity channels are independent, but have nonidentical statistics. The fading process in each channel is assumed to have an arbitrary Doppler spectrum with arbitrary Doppler bandwidth. Both optimum diversity reception and suboptimum diversity reception are considered. Results available previously apply only to the case of second-order diversity, and require numerical integration for their actual evaluation. Our results are more general, in that the order of diversity is arbitrary. Moreover, the bit-error probability (BEP) result is obtained in an exact, closed-form expression which shows the behavior of the BEP as an explicit function of the one-symbol-interval fading correlation coefficient at the matched-filter output, the mean received signal-to-noise ratio per symbol per channel, and the order of diversity