Analysis of Optimal Combining in Rician Fading with Co-channel Interference

TL;DR

This paper derives analytical expressions for symbol error rate, outage probability, and rate in Rician fading channels with co-channel interference, applicable to various interference scenarios and antenna configurations, validated by simulations.

Contribution

It provides new, comprehensive formulas for performance metrics in Rician fading with interference, including a closed-form SER in interference-limited Rayleigh scenarios.

Findings

Analytical expressions match Monte-Carlo simulations.

Formulas applicable to any number of antennas and interferers.

Closed-form SER in interference-limited Rayleigh case.

Abstract

Approximate Symbol error rate (SER), outage probability and rate expressions are derived for receive diversity system employing optimum combining when both the desired and the interfering signals are subjected to Rician fading, for the cases of a) equal power uncorrelated interferers b) unequal power interferers c) interferer correlation. The derived expressions are applicable for an arbitrary number of receive antennas and interferers and for any quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellation. Furthermore, we derive a simple closed form expression for SER in the interference-limited regime, for the special case of Rayleigh faded interferers. A close match is observed between the SER, outage probability and rate results obtained through the derived analytical expressions and the ones obtained from Monte-Carlo simulations.