Space diversity in the presence of discrete multipath

Most analytical studies of the performance of space diversity systems on fading channels have assumed a very rich multipath environment. In certain wireless applications, however, the number of significant multipath components can be small. We consider a multipath channel in which the signal propagates from the transmitter to the receiver via L discrete paths which are uniformly distributed about the transmitter and receiver. For this channel, we examine the performance of space diversity systems that employ receive diversity, transmit diversity, or space-time coding. The aim of this work is to determine how the error probability of space diversity systems varies with the number of multipath components and antenna array size