SER and SINR analysis of optimum combining in Rayleigh-product fading channels

This paper investigates the performance of optimum combining systems in Rayleigh-product fading channels with both co-channel interference and thermal noise. A unified closed-form expression for the moment generating function of the signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) for any numbers of receive antennas, scatterers in the environment, and interferers with arbitrary powers is derived. In light of this, exact results for the symbol error rate (SER) of M-ary phase-shift keying (PSK) signals are obtained. Also, simplified expressions for the moments of the SINR are derived, from which an explicit relationship to the moments in Rayleigh fading channels is revealed.