Novel Expressions and Applications for the Level Crossing Rate of Maximal Ratio Combining in the Presence of Cochannel Interferers

The level crossing rate (LCR) is an important second-order statistical quantity that characterizes the rate of occurrence of fading time intervals. In this paper, we investigate the LCR of multiantenna flat-fading channels in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise and cochannel interferers with unequal received powers and Doppler shifts. We first present a unified approach to derive the exact LCR of the signal-to-interference-noise ratio at a receiver, where maximum ratio combining is deployed over spatially correlated or uncorrelated systems. Through the exact LCR derivation, we identify an accurate approach to obtain a simplified approximate LCR expression in the spatially uncorrelated system case. Benefits of the LCR expressions derived in the paper are demonstrated in two important applications: 1) the packet error rate is evaluated through the finite-state Markov channel model; and 2) the optimum packet length to maximize the throughput of the system with the stop-and-wait automatic repeat request protocol is derived. The analytical results are validated by simulations.