Analytical study on the effect of cochannel interference on partially coherent diversity systems

In this paper, we study the effect of cochannel interference (CCI) on the performance of partially coherent BPSK and QPSK in uncorrelated L-branch equal-gain combining systems. We consider a generalized propagation model wherein the desired and interfering signals undergo Nakagami-m or Rician fading with different amounts of fading severity. Further, the interfering signals are assumed to be asynchronous symbol timing with the desired signal, so that the effect of cross-signal intersymbol interference (ISI) is taken into account. Using a convergent Fourier series method, we derive extensive analytical results for the average bit error probability and the SNR gain penalty caused by the interference signals for different signal to-interference ratio levels. The numerical results presented in this paper demonstrate the system performance under very realistic propagation and detection conditions including CCI, carrier phase error recovery, cross-signal ISI, generalized fading channels, and AWGN. Hence our results are expected to be of significant practical use for such scenarios.