Performance of N-branch receive diversity combining in correlated lognormal channels

Diversity reception techniques combine diversity branches to improve system performance. Fading gains of the diversity branches are correlated lognormal in indoor propagation as well as in systems deploying power control, handovers and dynamic channel allocation. In this letter, novel exact and compact expressions are proposed for the outage probability of N-branch maximal ratio combining (MRC), equal gain combining (EGC) and selection combining (SC) under correlated non-identically distributed lognormal channels. The proposed expressions consist of N-1 nested integrals with favorable numerical properties.