Performance of quadrature amplitude modulation in Nakagami fading channels with diversity

In mobile communication systems, multipath fading seriously degrades the performance. However, if the multipath medium is well characterized, transmitter and receiver can be designed to match the channel and to reduce the effect of these disturbances. Nakagami fading channel which is considered to be a good model for this channel is presented. The performance of M-ary Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (M-QAM) scheme which has high spectral efficiency is analyzed and the use of different diversity schemes to mitigate the effects of fading is investigated.; The goal of this thesis is to provide closed formulas for the performance of M-QAM without and with different diversity combining schemes over Nakagami fading channels which can be used by system designers and engineers. Computer simulations are performed to confirm the theoretical formulas derived and also to study the effects of changing some parameters on the performance of the system.