General order selection combining for Nakagami and Weibull fading channels

In this paper, some analytical results for general order selection (GOS) over independent but not necessarily identically distributed (i.n.d.) Weibull and Nakagami fading channels are presented. The Weibull fading parameters are assumed to be equal whereas the Nakagami fading parameters are assumed to be integer-valued. It is shown that the pdf of the q-th order statistic can be expressed as a linear combination of Weibull and Nakagami pdf's respectively. Closed-form expressions for the moment generating functions and general moments are derived. In addition, exact closed-form expressions for the symbol error rate are obtained for a number of modulation schemes. Numerical results show that for the same average channel gains, the performance on i.n.d. channels may be better or worse than on i.i.d. channels.