Performance analysis of MRC/EGC antenna diversity for M-GAM systems over Ricean fading channels with psam-based LMMSE channel estimation

In this thesis, the effect of imperfect channel estimation (ICE) on maximal-ratio combining (MRC) and equal-gain combining (EGC) in receive antenna diversity systems with M-level quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) are examined. The channel is assumed to be spatially-independent frequency-flat with Ricean fading and AWGN. Average BERs and outage probability of MRC and EGC antenna diversity combining schemes are analyzed via Monte-Carlo simulations versus average received bit SNR per antenna and specified outage threshold ?_th respectively for various values of Ricean K-factor, number of antennas L and normalized channel estimation correlation coefficient ? to show the actual diversity gain with these combining schemes under realistic LMMSE-based channel estimation scenarios for pilot-symbol aided modulation (PSAM).Key Words : Diversity combining, minimum mean square error channel estimation, quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), Ricean fading channel