Performance evaluation of L‐maximal ratio combining diversity with estimation error for Shadowed Beaulieu‐Xie fading channels

Summary To provide the increasing demand for wireless technologies, high capacity with lower latency is vital. New emerging technologies like 5G, millimeter wave, THz, and so forth are able to characterize such complex fading and shadowed environments. Spatial diversity is one of the techniques to minimize fading in the wireless communication channel. The performance of the wireless communication system can be further optimized by using estimators at the receivers. The influence of imperfect channel estimation on the performance over shadowed Beaulieu‐Xie (SBX) fading channels with L‐maximal ratio combining (MRC) diversity is studied. The probability density function (PDF) of the received output signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR) with L‐MRC over SBX fading channels is derived. Further PDF of the received output SNR, outage probability, and average bit error rate (ABER) using the derived PDF is evaluated for L‐MRC diversity with channel estimation error over SBX fading channels. ABER expression for Gray‐coded rectangular quadrature amplitude modulation over the SBX channel is also evaluated. The study also includes how the system performs under the effect of different shadowing and fading parameters. In this paper, performance analysis in terms of outage probability and ABER for different modulation schemes is carried out for L‐MRC diversity with estimation error over SBX fading channels. The study also investigates the influence of fading and shadowing parameters, estimation error parameters, and diversity order. The results show that to achieve a perfect system receiver, an accurate estimation of the channel is necessary. The performance of the diversity system may degrade with the presence of an inaccurate estimator.