Exact SINR calculations for optimum linear combining in wireless systems

This paper presents an exact derivation of the statistical distribution of the signal to interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for optimum linear combining in wireless systems with multiple cochannel interferers, Rayleigh fading, and additive white Gaussian noise. The distribution of the SINR is shown to be remarkably simple and leads to bounds on the bit error rate and outage probabilities which are tighter, simpler, and more robust than any previous results. The simplicity of the SINR distribution permits extremely fast computation of outage probabilities for any number of interference channels and diversity levels. Hence for wireless systems it enables performance studies to be performed over a much wider range of conditions, such as shadow fading, specific channel allocation methods, etc. Previously such studies were extremely limited due to the intensive computational requirements of simulating these systems.