Performance Improvement by Microdiversity for Wideband Signals in Frequency Selective Fading Indoor Channels with Co-Channel Interference

A comprehensive analytical bit-error-rate (BER) model is presented to analyse the performance of antenna-microdiversity for wideband BPSK modulated signals in the frequency selective fading multipath channel, specified by its complex impulse response. The model includes the disturbance by intersymbol interference (ISI) and co-channel interference (CCI), as well as the channels' impact on the carrier phase- and clock recovery in the receiver. The channel impulse responses at the antenna elements are determined by taking into account the direction of arrival of the individual paths. Computational BER- and SNIR-gain results (SNIR = signal-to-noise+interference-ratio) show that a substantial performance improvement is achieved with antenna combining for wideband signals which suffer ISI and/or CCI. For the indoor multipath channel with exponentially decaying power delay profile, the performance enhancement is compared for several antenna combining schemes. Quasi-coherent equal gain combining (QCEGC) is proposed as an novel EGC scheme based on a less accurate phase estimation technique. For wideband signals, QCEGC shows a slight performance degradation when compared to maximal ratio combining or minimum mean square error combining (MMSEC), but has a much lower implementation complexity. In the channel with CCI, where the best performance is achieved with MMSEC, QCEGC performs very poor.