On the performance of square arranged antenna array with SC and MRC receiver over Nakagami fading channel

In this paper, we investigate the performance of using a square array of four antennas for selection combining (SC), maximal-ratio combining (MRC) of Nakagami correlated signals. The closed form of average output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and bit error rate (BER) with SC for arbitrary 4 correlated branches will be derived and the expression of BER with MRC is also derived by utilizing the method of characteristic function (CF). Two models for angle of arrival (AOA), e.g. uniform and Gaussian, will be considered, as well as the comparison between their system performances. The effect of correlation coefficients and fading factor on the system performance are discussed by numerical results, which show that the uniform distributed AOA system outperforms the Gaussian distributed AOA system with small angular spread.