Performance evaluation of maximal ratio combining diversity over the Weibull fading channel in presence of co-channel interference

The Weibull distribution has recently attracted much attention among the radio community as a statistical model that better describes the fading phenomenon on wireless channels. In this paper, we consider a multiple access system in which each of the desired signal as well as the co-channel interferers are subject to Weibull fading. We analyze the performance of the L-branch maximal ratio combining (MRC) receiver in terms of the outage probability in such scenario in the two cases where the diversity branches are assumed to be independent or correlated. The analysis is also applicable to the cases where the diversity branches and/or the interferers fading amplitudes are non-identically distributed. Due to the difficulty of handling the resulting outage probability expressions numerically using the currently available mathematical software packages, we alternatively propose using Pade approximation (PA) to make the results numerically tractable. We provide numerical results for different number of interferers, different number of diversity branches as well as different degrees of correlation and power unbalancing between diversity branches. All our numerical results are verified by means of Monte-Carlo simulations and excellent agreement between the two sets is noticed