New transformation techniques for performance analysis of SC over correlated Rayleigh fading channels

This paper presents an approach to determine the bit error rate of selection combiners over correlated Rayleigh fading channels with an arbitrary covariance matrix. Our approach relies on a linear transformation technique to convert correlated Rayleigh fading signals into uncorrelated ones. The proposed analysis technique can be used for any number of correlated Rayleigh fading signals with balanced and unbalanced signal power. Based on our proposed approach the effects of diversity order, branch separation, and branch imbalance on the error performance are obtained which is not available in the previous literature.