Micro- and Macrodiversity MDPSK on Shadowed Frequency-Selective Channels

The performance of M-ary differential phase shift keying (MDPSK) on frequency-selective slow Rayleigh fading, lognormal shadowed channels with diversity combining is analyzed for mobile and portable applications. The use of L-branch equal gain postdetection microdiversity combining to mitigate the effects of fading and P-port macrodiversity to alleviate the effects of shadowing are investigated. Four performance criteria are considered for a frequency-selective multipath fading, intersymbol interference channel. These are, the short term bit error rate (BER), the irreducible BER, the complementary distribution over the lognormal shadowing of the average BER, and the probability that the instantaneous BER exceeds a threshold value, averaged over a spatial environment. Closed-form expressions for the four performance criteria are obtained. The BER and outage performance results show that diversity combining is an effective method for improving the system performance (and hence system reliability), when the normalized delay spread is not large. It is also seen that, in most cases, 4DPSK gives the best performance followed by 8DPSK and 2DPSK, respectively, for a given information throughput.