Simple Analysis for Average BER of Orthogonal Signals in Nonidentical Rician Channels with Improved-Gain Noncoherent Diversity Reception

This letter proposes a new noncoherent combiner, which we call the noncoherent weighted branches combiner (NC-WBC), to mitigate the disadvantages of the conventional noncoherent equal-gain combiner (NC-EGC) in nonidentically distributed Rician fading channels. It is shown that, unlike those of the NC-EGC, the NC-WBC results in simple closed-form expression for average bit error rate (BER) of the binary orthogonal signaling scheme. The results also show that the NC-WBC provides performance improvement, and alleviates the noncoherent combining loss of the NC-EGC. The theoretical development is verified by simulation results