INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS Int. J. Commun. Syst. (2015) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/dac.2925 Unified analysis of EGC diversity over Weibull fading channels Faissal El Bouanani 1, * ,† and Hussain Ben-Azza 2 1 ENSIAS, Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco 2 ENSAM, Moulay Ismail University, Meknes, Morocco SUMMARY In this paper, the performance analysis based on PDF approach of an L-branch equal gain combiner (EGC) over independent and not necessarily identical Weibull fading channels is presented. Several closed-form approximate expressions are derived in terms of only one Fox H-function as PDF, cumulative distribution function, and moments of the EGC output Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), outage probability, amount of fading, channel capacity, and the average symbol error rate for various digital modulation schemes. All results are illustrated and verified by simulations using computer algebra systems. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 10 June 2014; Revised 24 September 2014; Accepted 6 December 2014 KEY WORDS: Fox H-function; Meijer G-function; equal gain combining; Weibull fading; outage probability; amount of fading; shannon capacity; average symbol-error rate 1. INTRODUCTION The performance of wireless communication systems can be significantly improved using the diver- sity technique at relatively low cost [1, 2]. Equal gain combining (EGC) is one of various techniques of diversity combining used in wireless communications to combat the effect of fading and improve reliability and channel capacity (CC). It provides a compromise between performances and imple- mentation complexity. Indeed, EGC performance is close to the maximal ratio combining (MRC) and better than that of selective combiner while having relatively less implementation complexity. In EGC technique, the combiner equally weighs all input signals and then sums them to produce the decision statistic. The Weibull distribution is a flexible statistical model for describing multipath fading channels for both indoor and outdoor radio propagation channel [3, 4]. Because the exact PDF expression of the sum of Weibull random variables (RVs) is very difficult, if not impossible, to be solved in closed from, another way is to approximate it. In recent years, many research papers have been written on the performance of various diver- sity techniques over fading channels [5–20]. In [5], Annamalai et al. have approximated the average bit error rate (ABER) of EGC with coherent Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK) and Binary Frequency Shift Keying (BFSK) over correlated Nakagami-m fading amplitudes in terms of Appell’s hypergeometric function. The moment generating function (MGF) of SNR at the out- put of MRC and its performances analysis over Nakagami and Rician fading channel are derived for cooperative network in [6]. While the MGF of EGC/MRC output SNR and receiver perfor- mances (e.g. ABER) derived in [7–11] are accurate, the solution is still an approximation. In [12], average symbol error rate (ASER) and MGF of the output SNR are derived in terms of product and infinite series of Meijer G-functions [21]. Sagias et al. [13] derive joint PDF, CDF, *Correspondence to: Faissal El Bouanani, ENSIAS, Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco. † E-mail: elbouanani@ensias.ma Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.