A Novel Method for Performance Analysis of OFDM Polarization Diversity System in Ricean Fading Environment

OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) is proven to be a very effective modulation and multiple access technique that enables high data rate transmission. Due to its good performance it is already implemented in several standardized technologies, and it is very promising technique for the next generation wireless communication systems. Still, further system performance improvements under severe frequency selective fading conditions are necessary, and they can be obtained implementing diversity, at either transmit or/and receive end of a wireless link. Since polarization diversity can be realized using only one compact, dual polarized antenna, it can be considered as an attractive, space and cost effective solution. Analysis presented in this paper shows that implementation of dual polarized antenna at the receiver can lead to significant performance improvement, under certain propagation conditions. In order to calculate BER (Bit Error Rate) for the considered OFDM polarization diversity system with a certain level of the received signals correlation, we propose a novel analytical method. The obtained results are compared with the ones attained by simulation.