On the performance of DPSK in Rician fading channels with Class A noise

The performance analysis of a DPSK receiver over frequency nonselective Rician fading channels in Middleton's (1973) Class A noise is presented. With the aid of the characteristic function, the exact bit error rates (BERs) for both selection diversity and equal gain combining are derived. Furthermore, the performance of DPSK together with the (7,4) Hamming code or the (23,12) Golay code is evaluated. The results show that the channel coding technique can provide better performance than the diversity especially in the presence of highly "impulsive" noise. By using two diversity channels together with a simple channel code (Hamming code), robust performance can be achieved in Rician fading channels with non-Gaussian noise.