Performance Analysis of Dual Channel Maximal Ratio Combining Receiver over Nakagami-m Fading Channels

Abstract

In Wireless communication, the rapid fluctuations in the amplitude and phase of received radio signal are called fading. It has a significant impact on the quality of the demodulated signal. Fading can cause increase in bit error rate and leads to poor performance of the communication system. Thus fading model has to be selected which suits for the environments like urban, suburban and rural areas. The common type of model considered for urban region is Rayleigh-model. In practice, the fading can be weak and also severe than Rayleigh-model. Thus Nakagami-m model is selected to suits the conditions weaker and severe than Rayleigh fading. Diversity reception methodology can improve the performance of the communication system. The combined output of the diversity system will have an improved signal to noise ratio (SNR). In this paper, the performance of dual channel maximal ratio combiner (MRC) has been analyzed over Nakagami-m fading channels. A new method is used to derive the PDF and CDF of output SNR of the dual channel MRC combiner. Further using these expressions, the outage probability for dual channel MRC, SER for modulation schemes MPSK and MQAM have been derived. The obtained expressions have been evaluated numerically and compared with the available analytical results.