Error Rate Analysis of Amplitude-Coherent Detection over Rician Fading Channels with Receiver Diversity

Amplitude-coherent (AC) detection is an efficient technique that can simplify the receiver design while providing reliable symbol error rate (SER). Therefore, this work considers AC detector design and SER analysis using M-ary amplitude shift keying (MASK) modulation with receiver diversity over Rician fading channels. More specifically, we derive the optimum, near-optimum and a suboptimum AC detectors and compare their SER with the coherent, phase-coherent, noncoherent and the heuristic AC detectors. Moreover, the analytical and asymptotic SER at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) are derived for the heuristic detector using single and multiple receiving antennas. The obtained analytical and simulation results show that the SER of the AC and coherent MASK detectors are comparable, particularly for high values of the Rician K-factor, and small number of receiving antennas. In most of the considered scenarios, the heuristic AC detector outperforms the optimum noncoherent detector significantly, except for the binary ASK case at low SNRs. Moreover, the obtained results show that the heuristic AC detector is immune to phase noise, and thus, it outperforms the coherent detector in scenarios where the system is subject to considerable phase noise.