Outage probability of diversity systems over generalized fading channels

Outage probability is an important performance measure of communication sys tems operating over fading channels. Relying on a simple and accurate algor ithm for the numerical inversion of the Laplace transforms of cumulative di stribution functions, we develop a moment generating function-based numeric al technique for the outage probability evaluation of maximal-ratio combini ng (MRC) and postdetection equal-gain combining (EGC) in generalized fading channels for which the fading in each diversity path need not be independe nt, identically distributed, nor even distributed according to the same fam ily of distributions. The method is then extended to coherent EGG but only for the case of Nakagami-m fading channels, The mathematical formalism is i llustrated by applying the method to some selected numerical examples of in terest showing the impact of the power delay profile and the fading correla tion on the outage probability of MRC and EGC systems.