Effect of channel estimation errors on MRC diversity in Rician fading channels

We study the effect of imperfect channel estimation (ICE) on the performance of M-ary phase shift keying (M-PSK) with maximum ratio combining (MRC) in generalized Rician fading channels. First, we derive the error probability formulas for M-PSK with MRC and ICE in arbitrary Rician fading channels. Furthermore, we derive the effective receiver output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) statistics and the outage probability, and analytically quantify the average SNR loss of M-PSK caused by ICE, assuming independent diversity branches. Finally, we point out a major approximation in a popular approach used in the literature to evaluate the adverse effect of ICE.