The effects of channel correlation on maximal ratio combining performance in the presence of cochannel interferers

In this paper, we analyze the effects of channel correlation on the performance of maximal ratio combining (MRC) in receive antenna diversity systems. In the analysis, the channel is modelled as flat Rayleigh fading, slowly varying and an arbitrary number of cochannel interferers are assumed to be present. In an interference limited scenario, an exact closed form expression for signal to interference ratio (SIR) distribution is obtained for a dual antenna system. The degradation in the outage probability as a function of the correlation severity is investigated.