MRC in the Presence of Asynchronous Cochannel Interference Over Frequency-Selective Rayleigh Fading Channels

This paper studies the performance of Rake receivers with maximal ratio combining (MRC) in the presence of cochannel interference over slowly varying frequency-selective fading channels with combined spatial receive antenna diversity and temporal multipath diversity. Two models for the instantaneous powers of the residual multipath components and the resolved cochannel interfering signals, which represent the overall interfering signals, are employed. The first model considers the phase asynchronism between the desired signal replicas and interfering signals, whereas the second model assumes that the instantaneous powers of interfering signals incoherently add up. The desired signal replicas and interfering signals are assumed to experience statistically independent Rayleigh fading processes with arbitrary statistics. For the system model previously described, new closed-form expressions for the probability density function (pdf) of the combined signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) are derived. These expressions are then used to obtain formulas for various performance measures. The case study under consideration and the corresponding derived expressions for the statistical measures generalize many previous results and can usefully be employed to investigate the impact of various system and channel parameters on the performance of Rake receivers with MRC in the presence of cochannel interference.