Investigation into diversity order at micro and/or macro level in gamma shadowed Nakagami-m fading channels

Radio wave propagation through wireless channels is characterized by 4 main physical phenomena: reflection, diffraction, scattering, and absorption. Considerable efforts have been devoted to develop precise mathematical description of signal fluctuations which is very helpful in designing and evaluating the performance of wireless communication systems. A space diversity reception technique presents effective method for increasing channel capacity and upgrading transmission reliability at relatively low cost. In this paper, wireless communication system with maximal-ratio combining (MRC) microdiversity and selection combining (SC) macrodiversity reception operating over correlated gamma shadowed Nakagami-m fading channels is studied. Average bit error probability (ABEP), outage probability and average channel capacity, being significant and generally adopted performance measures, are employed to investigate how system performance is affected by the number of base stations and the number of antennas per base station.