Performance analysis of multiple carrier M-ary FSK system with diversity combining over generalized fading channels

We evaluate the performance of the multiple carrier M-ary frequency shift keying (MC-FSK) system over generalized fading channels. MC-FSK system represents each transmitted signal by a series of orthogonal components, which are activated based on the balanced incomplete block (BIB) design from the combinatorial theory. The performance is quantified in terms of the system power efficiency, by deriving an upper bound expression on the average bit error probability (BEP), and calculating the system bandwidth efficiency. The average BEP expression considers the case where the fading envelopes are not identically distributed and/or statistically described by the same statistical distribution family. Furthermore, we compare between the performance of the MC-FSK and that of the conventional M-ary FSK system. The results show that both systems achieve the same power efficiency when their combined diversity orders are equal, but at the same time, MC-FSK system does provide better bandwidth efficiency, which is proportional to the number of orthogonal carriers per transmitted signal. We show that MC-FSK system can simultaneously provide the same power efficiency at different bandwidth efficiencies depending on the number of orthogonal components per transmitted signal.