Performance of M-ary modulations with dual-branch coherent equal-gain combining in independent and correlated Nakagami-m fading

The symbol error rates of several M-ary modulation schemes are obtained in a unified manner for mobile radio receivers employing dual-branch equal-gain combining, where the Nakagami-m distributed received signals are either independent with not necessarily equal parameters, or correlated with equal m-parameters m₁ = m₂ = m but not necessarily equal fading powers {Ω₁, Ω₂}. While these results are restricted to integer or half-integer values of the m-parameters, for the case of equal fading powers expressions can be obtained for arbitrary real values of the m-parameters.