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

Performance Analysis of Selection Combining Over Correlated Nakagami-m Fading Channels with Constant Correlation Model for Desired Signal and Cochannel Interference

A very efficient technique that reduces fading and channel interference influence is selection diversity based on the signal to interference ratio (SIR). In this pa¬per, system performances of selection combiner (SC) over correlated Nakagami-m channels with constant correlation model are analyzed. Closed-form expressions are obtained for the output SIR probability density function (PDF) and cumulative distribution function (CDF) which is main contribution of this paper. Outage probability and the average error probability for coherent, noncoherent modulation are derived. Numerical results presented in this paper point out the effects of fading severity and cor¬relation on the system performances. The main contribu¬tion of this analysis for multibranch signal combiner is that it has been done for general case of correlated co-channel interference (CCI)

BER of MRC for M-QAM with imperfect channel estimation over correlated Nakagami-m fading

In this contribution, we provide an exact BER analysis for M-QAM transmission over arbitrarily correlated Nakagami-m fading channels with maximal-ratio combining (MRC) and imperfect channel estimation at the receiver. Assuming an arbitrary joint fading distribution and a generic pilot-based channel estimation method, we derive an exact BER expression that involves an expectation over (at most) 4 variables, irrespective of the number of receive antennas. The resulting BER expression includes well-known PDFs and the PDF of only the norm of the channel vector. In order to obtain the latter PDF for arbitrarily correlated Nakagami-m fading, several approaches from the literature are discussed. For identically distributed and arbitrarily correlated Nakagami-m channels with integer m, we present several BER performance results, which are obtained from numerical evaluation and confirmed by straightforward computer simulations. The numerical evaluation of the exact BER expression turns out to be much less time-consuming than the computer simulations