On the Closed-Form Performance Analysis of Maximal Ratio Combining in Shadowed-Rician Fading LMS Channels

In this paper, the maximal ratio combining (MRC) scheme in Shadowed-Rician (SR) fading land mobile satellite (LMS) channels is studied. The MRC scheme for SR fading LMS channels has been studied in existing literature; however, most of the existing analytical results are in the form of infinite power series, which are not in closed-form. In this paper, we derive approximate closed-form expressions of the probability density function and cumulative distribution function of the received signal-to-noise ratio of the MRC based receiver in SR fading LMS channels. Then we provide approximate closed-form expressions of the bit error rate (BER), outage probability, and capacity of the considered scheme. One of the derived closed-form BER expressions is found useful for obtaining the analytical diversity order and coding gain of the considered MRC scheme.