Closed-form analysis of dual-diversity equal-gain combiners over Rayleigh fading channels

Starting with a new expression for the probability density function of the signal-to-noise ratio at the output of dual-diversity equal-gain combining (EGC) over not identically distributed Rayleigh channels, we provide closed-form expressions for the outage probability as well as average bit and symbol error rate of binary and M-ary phase-shift keying signals. Numerical examples indicate that EGC maintains a good diversity gain as long as the degree of unbalance is not very low but suffers a sharp and significant degradation when the degree of unbalance approaches zero.