Analysis of Optimal Combining in Rician Fading With Co-Channel Interference

Approximate symbol error rate (SER), outage probability, and rate expressions are derived for receive diversity system employing optimum combining when both the desired and the interfering signals are subjected to Rician fading, for the cases of equal power uncorrelated interferers, unequal power interferers, and interferer correlation. The derived expressions are applicable for an arbitrary number of receive antennas and interferers and for any quadrature amplitude modulation constellation. Furthermore, we derive a simple closed-form expression for SER in the interference-limited regime, for the special case of Rayleigh faded interferers. A close match is observed between the SER, outage probability, and rate results obtained through the derived analytical expressions and the ones obtained from Monte Carlo simulations.