Pilot symbol assisted diversity reception for a fading channel

Pilot symbol assisted modulation is a promising scheme to mitigate the effect of fading in a wireless channel. Analytical results for the performance of this scheme are available. Although the use of diversity is known to improve the performance of receivers used in fading channels, pilot symbol assisted diversity reception has not been studied. In this paper, we derive an exact probability of error expression for such a receiver as a function of the channel estimation error variance and the number of diversity channels. An upper bound for the probability of error which illustrates the advantage of using diversity, is also obtained. A numerical example is provided.