A tight approximate analytical framework for performance analysis of equal gain combining receiver over independent Weibull fading channels

In this paper, a method for approximating the probability distribution of sum of independent and identical Weibull random variables is adopted to analyze the performance of equal gain combiner (EGC) receiver over non-identical Weibull fading channel (WFC). Our main result is to derive a generalized expression of the probability density function (PDF) of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the EGC output in the case of non-identical WFC. Based on this PDF, accurate approximation of significant performance criteria, such as outage probability (OP), the amount of fading (AoF), and average symbol/bit error probability (ASEP/ABEP), are derived. In addition, we derived the analytical expressions for channel capacities under various adaptation policies such as optimal rate adaptation (ORA), optimal simultaneous power and rate adaptation (OPRA), channel inversion with fixed rate (CIFR), and truncated channel inversion with fixed rate (TCIFR). The proposed mathematical analysis is complemented by several numerical results and validated using Monte Carlo simulation method. © 2017, The Author(s).