Performance of M-QAM, M-DPSK and M-PSK with MRC diversity in a Nakagami-m fading channel

Abstract

The nature of a wireless communication channel is very unpredictable. To design a good communication link, it is required to know the statistical model of the channel accurately. The average symbol error probability (ASER) was analyzed for different modulation schemes. A unified analytical framework was presented to obtain closed-form solutions for calculating the ASER of M-ary differential phase-shift keying (M-DPSK), coherent M-ary phase-shift keying (M-PSK), and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) over single or multiple Nakagami-m fading channels. Moreover, the ASER was estimated and evaluated by using the maximal ratio-combining (MRC) diversity technique. Simulation results show that an error rate of the fading channel typically depends on Nakagami parameters (m), space diversity (N), and symbol rate (M). A comparison between M-PSK, M-DPSK, and M-QAM modulation schemes was shown, and the results prove that M-ary QAM (M-QAM) demonstrates better performance compared to M-DPSK and M-PSK under all fading and non-fading conditions.