Revised Analyses of Postdetection Switched Combining in Nakagami-<tex>$m$</tex>Fading

Abstract

In two recent papers, the performances of dual-branch postdetection switch-and-stay combining (SSC) for noncoherent orthogonal binary frequency-shift keying (BFSK) and noncoherent orthogonal M-ary frequency-shift keying (MFSK) operating in the presence of slow flat fading modeled by Rayleigh, Nakagami-m, and Rician distributions have been analyzed. In this paper, we show that these previous analyses for the Nakagami-m fading model, which are restricted to integer values of m, are incorrect, and we derive the correct bit-error rate (BER) performances of BFSK and MFSK with dual-branch SSC in Nakagami-m fading for all values of m. Optimum switching thresholds that minimize the BER of BFSK and MFSK with postdetection SSC in Nakagami-m fading are obtained. The performance of postdetection SSC is compared with the performance of predetection SSC, and it is shown that postdetection SSC outperforms predetection SSC for all values of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We also show that for a given BER, the performance gain of postdetection SSC over predetection SSC has been overestimated by several decibels in SNR in previous publications.