Space diversity in presence of discrete multipath fading channel

Most analytical studies of the performance of space diversity systems on fading channels assume a very rich multipath environment. In certain wireless applications, however, the number of significant multipath components can be small. In this letter, we consider a multipath channel in which the signal propagates from the transmitter to the receiver via L discrete paths which are uniformly distributed about the transmitter and receiver. For this channel, we study the effects of the number of multipath components and antenna array size on the error probability and outage capacity of space diversity systems. We observe that performance is significantly influenced by the presence of a channel with few multipath components.