PERFORMANCE OF MQAM WITH DUAL MRC DIVERSITY RECEPTION OVER CORRELATED NAKAGAMI – m FADING CHANNELS

Error rate performance of coherent square M – ary quadrature amplitude modulation (CSMQAM) over fading channels under diversity reception is obtained and analyzed. The diversity combining technique considered is maximal ratio combining (MRC). The fading channels are modeled as frequency nonselective slow Nakagami – m fading channels corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). The exact and closed form expressions for the symbol error rate (SER) of CSMQAM over independent and correlated Nakagami – m fading channels under two branch MRC diversity reception are derived and analyzed. The analytical results presented in this paper are simple enough so that these can be computed numerically with out any approximations and are general enough to include half Gaussian fading, Rayleigh fading and AWGN as special cases.