BER Analysis of BPSK Signals in Ricean-Faded Cochannel Interference

The bit error rate of a binary phase shift keying (BPSK) signal in Ricean-faded cochannel interference is studied. A precise bit error rate expression is derived for a bandlimited BPSK signal corrupted by an arbitrary number of asynchronous Ricean-faded interfering signals. An error rate estimation based on a saddlepoint approximation is also provided. It is shown that this approximation is highly accurate. For the special case, when there is one synchronous Ricean-faded interfering signal in an interference-limited environment, an asymptotic error rate analysis based on the saddle point approximation reveals that fading in the cochannel interfering signal can have different impacts on the desired user´s error rate performance. Our study shows that when the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) is sufficiently large, the error floor of the desired user signal decreases with an increase of the Rice factor in the interfering user´s fading channel. However, the opposite phenomenon can happen when the SIR is small.