Performance analysis of signal-to-interferenceplus- noise ratio-based selection diversity over correlated rayleigh fading channels

In wireless communications systems, desired signal can be exposed to fading, cochannel interference (CCI) and noise. Diversity combining, such as space diversity, is a well-known method that can be used to alleviate the effects of these degradations. L-branch selection combining (SC) receiver which uses signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) power algorithm over correlated Rayleigh fading channels in the presence of Rayleigh distributed CCI and Gaussian noise is considered. The outage probability as significant performance criteria is analytically derived. The main contribution of this paper is that the analysis is carried out including the noise as a stochastic process, not only its average power value. The proposed mathematical analysis is complemented by various evaluation results showing the effects of the fading correlation as well as the number of diversity branches on the system´s performance. In addition, SC performance in interference-plus-noise environment is compared with performance in noise- and interference-limited environments.