Error probability performance for WCDMA systems with multiple transmit and receive antennas in correlated Nakagami fading channels

The bit error rate (BER) performance of a two-dimensional (2-D) RAKE receiver, in combination with transmit diversity on the downlink of a wide-band CDMA (W-CDMA) system, is presented. The analyses assume correlated fading between receive antenna array elements, and an arbitrary number of independent but nonidentical resolvable multipaths combined by the RAKE receiver in the general Nakagami-m fading channel framework. The impact of the array configuration (e.g., the number of transmit antennas and receive antennas, the antenna element separation) and the operating environment parameters (such as the fading severity, angular spread and path delay profile) on the overall space-path diversity gain can be directly evaluated. In addition, the exact pairwise error probability of a convolutional coded system is obtained, and the coding gain of a space-path diversity receiver is quantified.