Performance analysis of coherent DS-CDMA systems in a Nakagami fading channel with arbitrary parameters

A new expression for the bit error rate (BER) of an asynchronous direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) system with coherent BPSK demodulation in a multipath Nakagami (1960) fading channel is derived. The analysis assumes an arbitrary number of independent, but nonidentical resolvable paths combined by the RAKE receiver. The results obtained show that in such systems, the effect of nonidentical fading on system performance cannot be ignored.