Selection diversity for wireless communications in Nakagami-fading with arbitrary parameters

By means of analytical and numerical methods, the probability of error and the outage probability of a selection diversity RAKE receiver system employing direct sequence/code division multiple access (DS/CDMA) is derived. A noise-limited propagation environment is modeled as a Nakagami (1960)-fading channel with arbitrary fading parameters and unequal mean power at the receiver. New analytical expressions are derived for the average probability of error and outage probability. Binary detection schemes are considered including binary phase-shift keying (PSK) and frequency-shift keying (FSK). Both coherent and noncoherent detection is considered as well as identical and arbitrary fading. It is shown that the effect of arbitrary fading on system performance is significant and may not be ignored.