Performance of DS-CDMA receivers with MRC in Nakagami-m fading channels with arbitrary fading parameters

The receivers that combine spatial antenna diversity with temporal multipath diversity are known as two-dimensional (2-D) RAKE receivers. In this paper, we consider the outage probability and the bit error rate performance of a coherent binary phase shift keying 2-D RAKE receiver in the context of an asynchronous direct sequence (DS)-code division multiple access (CDMA) system operating in a Nakagami-m fading channel with real and arbitrary fading parameters. The closed-form expressions derived for the two wireless performance measures are easily evaluated numerically and enable the link designer to examine the effects of system parameters, such as the number of receive antennas, RAKE fingers per antenna, and asynchronous CDMA users in the cell, as well as channel conditions, such as the amount of fading in the combined paths and the multipath intensity profile of the channel on the link performance. In addition, the diversity loss due to correlated fading among the spatially separated RAKE fingers is quantified.