Diversity combining for coherent and differential M-PSK in fading and class-A impulsive noise

In this paper, optimum and suboptimum diversity combining schemes for coherent and differential M-ary phase-shift keying (M-PSK) transmission impaired by general Ricean fading and impulsive Class-A noise are derived and analyzed. The proposed suboptimum coherent combining (SCC) and suboptimum noncoherent combining (SNC) schemes yield similar performance as the corresponding optimum combining schemes but require a lower computational complexity. In addition, the novel SCC and SNC strategies achieve large performance gains over conventional maximum ratio combining (MRC) and equal gain combining (EGC), respectively. For MRC and EGC, respectively, we also provide a performance analysis for coherent and differential M-PSK transmissions over general Ricean fading channels with Class-A noise. Furthermore, tight performance upper bounds for the proposed optimum and suboptimum combining schemes are derived.