SER of M-ary NCFSK with S + N Selection Combining in Nakagami Fading for Integer m

The performance of M-ary orthogonal noncoherent frequency-shift keying (NCFSK) with N branch signal-plus-noise (S + N) selection combining (SC) in Nakagami-m fading (m, integer) is studied. Both independent, identically distributed (i.i.d) and independent, nonidentically distributed (i.n.d) diversity branches are considered and two S + N SC receiver structures are examined. The performances of the S + N SC receivers are compared to those of classical SC and square-law combining (SLC) receivers. The effects of modulation order, fading parameter and the number of diversity branches on the performance of S + N SC are compared to the effects on the performances of classical SC and SLC. For example, it is shown that in an i.n.d fading channel, the value of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at which the error rate curves of classical SC and S + N SC cross, decreases as the modulation order, M, increases. Our results indicate that in i.n.d fading channels classical SC outperforms S + N SC for small ranges of SNR, while for moderate to large SNR values S + N SC has superior performance over classical SC. It is also shown that increasing the diversity order will increase the performance gap of S 4N SC over classical SC and over SLC in both i.i.d and i.n.d Nakagami-m fading channels