Evaluation of M-ary Rician fading channel

The system performance of M-ary orthogonal signaling over a Rician fading channel is evaluated. The probability of error expression for a suboptimal receiver is developed for the Rician fading channel using M orthogonal signals. The near-optimality of this receiver is demonstrated by comparing simulation results for both the optimum and the suboptimum receiver to the theoretical suboptimum receiver. It is shown theoretically for M=2, and through simulation for M=2, 4, and 8 that this suboptimum receiver is near-optimum for a small specular component or large M. In all cases the suboptimum results yield good upper bounds on the optimum receiver probability of symbol error and are much easier to evaluate