MRC receiver performance with MQAM in correlated Rician fading channels

Due to difficulties in deriving the probability density function, the performance of the maximal ratio combining (MRC) diversity receiver in correlated Rician fading channels is rarely reported in the literature. This article shows that the difficulty can be avoided by a linear transformation technique. General closed-form expressions of the average symbol error rate (SER) for various modulation schemes can be easily derived. As an example, this paper derives the SER of multilevel quadrature amplitude modulation (MQAM) over correlated Rician fading channels.