Error Analysis of a Coherent SIMO PLC System with Correlated Channels in Nakagami-m Environment

A power-line communication (PLC) system with receive diversity is considered in this paper. The transmitter employs binary phase-shift keying for data modulation over correlated PLC channels and the data signals are considered to be corrupted by additive Nakagami-m noise in each channel with m < 1. An optimal maximum likelihood-based receiver structure is proposed for the system, which is further utilized to derive series-form expressions for the symbol error probability (SEP) for the PLC system with uniformly and exponentially correlated channels. The variation of the SEP with the average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the system, the noise shape parameter
$m$
, and the correlation coefficient are studied numerically. It is observed that the correlation among the channels does not affect the full diversity order of the system and degrades the SEP value by the factor of the product of the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix of the correlated channels.