Influence of imperfect cophasing on performance of EGC receiver of BPSK and QPSK signals transmitted over Weibull fading channel

ABSTRACT The performance of the partially coherent equal gain combining receiver for binary phase‐shift keying and quaternary phase‐shift keying signals transmitted over the Weibull fading channels is analysed in this paper. The bit error rate (BER) degradations caused by simultaneous influences of incoherently combining and fading severity are determined. The numerical and simulation results show that stochastic phase error causes irreducible error floor. Efficient approximated closed‐form expressions for BER floor are derived. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The performance of the partially coherent equal gain combining receiver over Weibull fading channel is analyzed. The bit error rate (BER) degradations caused by simultaneous influences of incoherently combining and fading severity are determined. The numerical and simulation results show that stochastic phase error causes irreducible error floor. Efficient approximated closed‐form expressions for BER floor are derived. These expressions establish simple relation among fading severity, standard deviation of phase error and BER floor value.