Dual-Branch MRC Receivers under Spatial Interference Correlation and Nakagami Fading

Despite being ubiquitous in practice, the performance of maximal-ratio combining (MRC) in the presence of interference is not well understood. Because the interference received at each antenna originates from the same set of interferers, but partially de-correlates over the fading channel, it possesses a complex correlation structure. This work develops a realistic analytic model that accurately accounts for the interference correlation using stochastic geometry. Modeling interference by a Poisson shot noise process with independent Nakagami fading, we derive the link success probability for dual-branch interference-aware MRC. Using this result, we show that the common assumption that all receive antennas experience equal interference power underestimates the true performance, although this gap rapidly decays with increasing the Nakagami parameter $m_{\text{I}}$ of the interfering links. In contrast, ignoring interference correlation leads to a highly optimistic performance estimate for MRC, especially for large $m_{\text{I}}$. In the low outage probability regime, our success probability expression can be considerably simplified. Observations following from the analysis include: (i) for small path loss exponents, MRC and minimum mean square error combining exhibit similar performance, and (ii) the gains of MRC over selection combining are smaller in the interference-limited case than in the well-studied noise-limited case.Comment: to appear in IEEE Transactions on Communication

An efficient approximation to the correlated Nakagami-m sums and its application in equal gain diversity receivers

There are several cases in wireless communications theory where the statistics of the sum of independent or correlated Nakagami-m random variables (RVs) is necessary to be known. However, a closed-form solution to the distribution of this sum does not exist when the number of constituent RVs exceeds two, even for the special case of Rayleigh fading. In this paper, we present an efficient closed-form approximation for the distribution of the sum of arbitrary correlated Nakagami-m envelopes with identical and integer fading parameters. The distribution becomes exact for maximal correlation, while the tightness of the proposed approximation is validated statistically by using the Chi-square and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov goodness-of-fit tests. As an application, the approximation is used to study the performance of equal-gain combining (EGC) systems operating over arbitrary correlated Nakagami-m fading channels, by utilizing the available analytical results for the error-rate performance of an equivalent maximal-ratio combining (MRC) system

A Comparative Study of Relaying Schemes with Decode-and-Forward over Nakagami-m Fading Channels

Utilizing relaying techniques to improve performance of wireless systems is a promising avenue. However, it is crucial to understand what type of relaying schemes should be used for achieving different performance objectives under realistic fading conditions. In this paper, we present a general framework for modelling and evaluating the performance of relaying schemes based on the decode-and-forward (DF) protocol over independent and not necessarily identically distributed (INID) Nakagami-m fading channels. In particular, we present closed-form expressions for the statistics of the instantaneous output signal-to-noise ratio of four significant relaying schemes with DF; two based on repetitive transmission and the other two based on relay selection (RS). These expressions are then used to obtain closed-form expressions for the outage probability and the average symbol error probability for several modulations of all considered relaying schemes over INID Nakagami-m fading. Importantly, it is shown that when the channel state information for RS is perfect, RS-based transmission schemes always outperform repetitive ones. Furthermore, when the direct link between the source and the destination nodes is sufficiently strong, relaying may not result in any gains and in this case it should be switched-off.Comment: Submitted to Journal of Computer Systems, Networks, and Communication

On the Sum of Order Statistics and Applications to Wireless Communication Systems Performances

We consider the problem of evaluating the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the sum of order statistics, which serves to compute outage probability (OP) values at the output of generalized selection combining receivers. Generally, closed-form expressions of the CDF of the sum of order statistics are unavailable for many practical distributions. Moreover, the naive Monte Carlo (MC) method requires a substantial computational effort when the probability of interest is sufficiently small. In the region of small OP values, we propose instead two effective variance reduction techniques that yield a reliable estimate of the CDF with small computing cost. The first estimator, which can be viewed as an importance sampling estimator, has bounded relative error under a certain assumption that is shown to hold for most of the challenging distributions. An improvement of this estimator is then proposed for the Pareto and the Weibull cases. The second is a conditional MC estimator that achieves the bounded relative error property for the Generalized Gamma case and the logarithmic efficiency in the Log-normal case. Finally, the efficiency of these estimators is compared via various numerical experiments

Performance of Fractionally Spread Multicarrier CDMA in AWGN as Well as Slow and Fast Nakagami-m Fading Channels

Abstract—In multicarrier code-division multiple-access (MCCDMA), the total system bandwidth is divided into a number of subbands, where each subband may use direct-sequence (DS) spreading and each subband signal is transmitted using a subcarrier frequency. In this paper, we divide the symbol duration into a number of fractional subsymbol durations also referred to here as fractions, in a manner analogous to subbands in MC-CDMA systems. In the proposed MC-CDMA scheme, the data streams are spread at both the symbol-fraction level and at the chip level by the transmitter, and hence the proposed scheme is referred to as the fractionally spread MC-CDMA arrangement, or FS MCCDMA. Furthermore, the FS MC-CDMA signal is additionally spread in the frequency (F)-domain using a spreading code with the aid of a number of subcarriers. In comparison to conventional MC-CDMA schemes, which are suitable for communications over frequency-selective fading channels, our study demonstrates that the proposed FS MC-CDMA is capable of efficiently exploiting both the frequency-selective and the time-selective characteristics of wireless channels. Index Terms—Broadband communications, code-division multiple access (CDMA), fractionally spreading, frequency-domain spreading, multicarrier modulation, Nakagami fading, timedomain spreading