Analysis of transmit–receive diversity in Rayleigh fading

Abstract — We analyze the error performance of a wireless communication system employing transmit-receive diversity in Rayleigh fading. By focussing on the complex Gaussian statistics of the independent and identically distributed entries of the channel matrix, we derive a formula for the characteristic function (c.f.) of the maximum out-put signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We use this c.f. to obtain a closed-form expression of the symbol er-ror probability (SEP) for coherent binary keying. An approximate expression for the SEP when the average SNR per branch is large is also obtained. The method can be easily extended to obtain the SEP of M-ary modulation schemes. I