Performance of equal gain combining with quantized phases in rayleigh fading channels

In this paper, we analyze the error probability of equal gain combining with quantized channel phase compensation for binary phase shift keying signalling over Rayleigh fading channels. The probability density and characteristic functions of the combined signal amplitude are derived and used to compute the analytic expressions for the bit error probability in dependance of the number of quantization levels L, the number of diversity branches N-R and the average received signal-to-noise ratio. The analysis is utilized to outline the trade-off between N-R and L and to compare the performance with non-coherent binary frequency shift keying and differential binary phase shift keying schemes under diversity reception.