Explicit analytical expressions for outage and error rate of diversity cellular systems in the presence of multiple interferers and correlated Rayleigh fading

The outage probability of maximal ratio combining diversity with an arbitrary number of antennas in the presence of an arbitrary number of cochannel interferers and thermal noise is derived when the branch gains of the desired user signal and interfering signals experience Rayleigh fading and have the same correlation matrix. Two special cases, when the correlation matrix is equicorrelated and when the correlation matrix has different eigenvaiues, are considered for both the equal-power cochannel interference case and the unequal-power cochannel interference case. Further, the average bit-error rate of a coherent binary phase-shift keying (BPSK)-modulated cellular system using maximal ratio combining diversity in cochannel interference and correlated Rayleigh fading is derived. The effects of the average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the average signal-power-to-interference-power ratio on the system performance are examined. Index Terms--Bit-error rate (BER), cochannel interference (CCI), diversity, fading channels, maximal ratio combining (MRC), outage probability, Rayleigh, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), signal-power-to-interference-power ratio, signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR).