Closed-Form Analysis of Equal-Gain Diversity in Wireless Radio Networks

This paper deals with the performance of predetection equal-gain combining (EGC) receivers operating over multipath fading plus cochannel interference (CCI) and additive white Gaussian noise channels. The desired components of the received signals are considered to experience independent but not-necessarily identically distributed Nakagami-m fading, while the interferers are subject to independent Rayleigh fading. The analysis is not only limited to equal average fading power interferers, but the case of interferers with distinct average powers is also examined. By following the coherent interference power calculation, novel closed-form expressions for the moments of the EGC output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) are derived, which are being used to study the performance of the average output SINR. Furthermore, by assuming an interference-limited fading scenario, novel closed-form union performance bounds are derived. More specifically, tight upper bounds for the outage and average symbol error probability for several constant envelope modulation schemes, and lower bounds for the Shannon average spectral efficiency, are provided. Numerical results demonstrate the effect of the number of interferers, the number of the receiver branches, and the severity of fading on the EGC receiver performance. Computer simulations have been also performed to verify the tightness of the proposed bounds and the correctness of the mathematical analysis. It is shown that the performance of cellular radio systems in the uplink is degraded mainly from the first-tier CCI of the adjacent cells