Error rates for Nakagami-m fading multichannel reception of binary and M-ary signals

This paper derives new closed-form formulas for the error probabilities of single and multichannel communications in Rayleigh and Nakagami-m (1960) fading. Closed-form solutions to three generic trigonometric integrals are presented as part of the main result, providing a unified method for the derivation of exact closed-form average symbol-error probability expressions for binary and M-ary signals with L independent channel diversity reception. Both selection-diversity and maximal-ratio combining (MRC) techniques are considered. The results are generally applicable for arbitrary two-dimensional signal constellations that have polygonal decision regions operating in a slow Nakagami-m fading environments with positive integer fading severity index. MRC with generically correlated fading is also considered. The new expressions are applicable in many cases of practical interest. The closed-form expressions derived for a single channel reception case can be extended to provide an approximation for the error rates of binary and M-ary signals that employ an equal-gain combining diversity receiver.