On diversity reception over fading channels with impulsive noise

The prevalence of impulsive electromagnetic interference, atmospheric or ignition noise necessitates thorough analysis of their effects on the performance of diversity combining schemes. In this paper, we adopt Middleton's Class A model for the noise distribution, and analyze the performance of different diversity combining techniques over fading channels with statistically dependent impulsive noise on each branch. We systematically analyze the performance of Maximum Ratio Combing (MRC), Equal Gain Combining (EGC), Selection Combining (SC), and Post-Detection Combining (PDC) under the impulsive noise model, and derive insightful upper bounds. We show that even under impulsive noise, the diversity order is retained for each combining scheme. However, there is a fundamental tradeoff between diversity gain and coding gain. Our simulation results corroborate our analysis.