BER performance of distributed antenna systems in Nakagami-m fading channel

Abstract

The performance of distributed antenna systems (DASs) downlink is studied over MIMO Nakagami fading channel, and corresponding bit error rate (BER) analysis is presented. By means of the theoretical analysis, the probability density function and cumulative distribution function of the system effective signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) are attained. According to these results, we further derive average BER of DAS with MQAM and MPSK under fading environment. As a result, an accurate BER expression for DAS with MQAM and a tight BER approximation for DAS with MPSK are obtained. To simplify the calculation of the accurate BERs, approximate closed-form BER expressions are also derived, which are shown to match the accurate BERs well. With these expressions, the downlink performance is effectively assessed. Simulation results corroborate our theoretical analysis, and the approximate BER expressions are very close to the accurate ones but with lower computational complexity.