Asymptotic Outage Probability of Dual-Branch Equal-Gain Combining over Correlated, Non-Identically Distributed Lognormal Fading Channels

Abstract

Exact outage probability analysis for equal-gain combining (EGC) over lognormal fading channels results in multi-fold integrals, and traditional asymptotic analysis techniques cannot work for lognormal fading channels due to the channels' infinite diversity order. In this work, we derive a closed-form asymptotic outage probability expression for dual-branch EGC over correlated lognormal fading channels with different statistics. The new result reveals insights into the long-standing problem of asymptotic analysis for correlated lognormal fading channels, paving the way for analysis on more general channel models. The result also provides an efficient way to evaluate the performance of dual-branch EGC over correlated and nonidentically distributed lognormal channels at high signal-to-noise ratio.