EGC Diversity Reception of CPSK Signals in Nakagami Fading

A novel method for evaluating the symbol error rate of M-ary CPSK signals received over Nakagami-w fading channels with equal-gain combining (EGC) is presented. The new method does not rely on the characteristic function of the sum of Nakagami random variables. The error rate of CPSK signals for L-channel diversity is expressed as a L-fold integral. The multiple integrals can be efficiently computed using either the Gauss-Hermite quadrature or the Gauss-Laguerre quadrature integration formulas to obtain accurate numerical results. Numerical values for the error rates of 2-, 4- and 8-CPSK signals for EGC diversity reception are presented