Improved Exact Evaluation of Equal-Gain Diversity Receivers in Rayleigh Fading Channels

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of equal-gain-combining (EGC) receivers operating in Rayleigh fading channels in terms of the outage probability (OP) and the average symbol error rate (ASER). For this, we first derive novel, improved, fast, and exact series representations for the probability density function (PDF) and the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the sum of independent and identically distributed Rayleigh random variables by employing complex analysis as well as the properties of the moment-generating function (MGF). With these results, exact and closed-form-asymptotic expressions to evaluate the OP and the ASER are derived. The efficiency of our expressions, defined in terms of tractability, computational burden, and computation time, overcome the state-of-the-art solutions. Monte-Carlo simulations and a time comparison analysis with the state-of-the-art study support our results.