Maximum achievable diversity order for cascaded Rayleigh fading channels

Introduction: Cascaded Rayleigh distribution is used to model multipath fading in mobile-to-mobile communication scenarios and provides a better fit to experimental data in such scenarios compared to the conventional Rayleigh channel model, see [1] and references therein. Although there is a vast literature dedicated to the performance analysis over Rayleigh fading channels, there are only a few results available for cascaded Rayleigh channels. Specifically, error rate performance expressions have been derived in [1, 2] for differential binary PSK (DBPSK), differential quadrature PSK (DQPSK) and noncoherent frequency shift keying (NFSK) assuming single transmit and receive antennas. In this Letter, we present an exact expression for the SER of coherently detected M-PSK signals with receive antenna diversity over cascaded Rayleigh fading channels.