ABSTRACT
Signal performance improvement at the receiver achieved by using diverse reception techniques will be considered through the standard performance criteria, defined in Chapter 4, such as average symbol error rate (ASEP) and outage probability (OP). The usage of space diversity techniques, described in Chapter 4, will be discussed. For determining the previously mentioned criteria, it is necessary to determine joint statistics at the diversity structure inputs. Since both multipath fading and cochannel interference (CCI) are considered to be significant drawbacks, it is necessary to observe the ratios of desired signals and corresponding cochannel interferers, at the multibranch diversity structure inputs, and their joint statistics. When a diversity system is applied on small terminals with multiple antennas, which is often a real scenario in practice, fading among the branches is correlated due to insufficient antenna spacing [1]. Therefore, it is important to understand how the correlation between received signals affects the system performances. Several correlation models have been proposed in the literature for evaluating the performances of a diversity system. In this chapter, we will discuss cases of uncorrelated multibranch reception, such as the diversity reception cases over correlated fading channels.
