Performance of a 2D-RAKE receiver over spatially correlated, slow Rayleigh fading channel

In this paper, the performance of a 2D-RAKE receiver for DS-CDMA cellular communication systems with antenna arrays at the base station is analyzed and a closed form expression of BER for BPSK modulations based on the eigenvalues of correlation matrix is derived. The BER performance is compared with the approximated BER reported in (A. Poloni et al., June 2001) for flat Rayleigh fading channel. The results are numerically computed for both uniform angle-of-arrival (AOA) and truncated Gaussian AOA probability distributions, where the later is more realistic as measurements suggest. The results show that for a small angle spread a substantial spatial diversity gain can be achieved. It is also shown that the variance of distribution is more important than that of actual distribution for BER calculations.