Outage and Symbol Error Probability Performance of L-branch Maximal-Ratio Combiner for Generalized κ-μ Fading

Maximal-Ratio combiner (MRC) performances in fading channels have been of interest for a long time, which can be seen by a number of papers concerning this topic. Most of these papers treat Rayleigh, Nakagami-m, Hoyt, Rice or Weibull fading. This paper treats outage and symbol error probability (SEP) performances of dual-branch MRC in presence of generalized kappa - mu fading. In this paper, we will present kappa - mu fading model, expressions for outage and SEP of the L-branch MRC output, but we will only hold on to the most interesting case when L=2. SEP will be treated for a broad class of modulation types and for coherent and non-coherent types of detection. Outage and SEP performances of the MRC will be presented via Monte Carlo simulations and theoretical expressions.