Performance analysis of square arranged antenna array with SC and MRC receiver over Nakagami fading channel

In this paper, the performance of using a square array of four antennas for selection combining (SC) and maximal-ratio combining (MRC) of Nakagami correlated signals is investigated. The closed form of average output signal-to-noise ratio and bit error rate (BER) for SC with arbitrary four correlated branches is derived; the expression of BER with MRC is also derived by utilizing the characteristic function method. Two models for the angle of arrival (AOA), i.e., uniform and truncated Gaussian, are considered in the system performance evaluation. The effects of correlation coefficients and fading factor on the system performance are investigated through numerical examples, which show that the uniformly distributed AOA system outperforms the truncated Gaussian-distributed counterpart with small angular spread. The degradation of system performance in the presence of one-antenna failure is also investigated.