On the inverse symbol-error probability for diversity reception

This paper addresses the problem of finding the inverse symbol-error probability (SEP) expression for coherent detection of M-ary phase-shift keying with multichannel reception and maximal ratio combining in Rayleigh fading. To this aim, we derive upper and lower bounds on SEP that are simply invertible and uniformly tight for all values of signal-to-noise ratio. This enables us to obtain tight bounds on the inverse SEP and on the symbol-error outage (SEO), i.e., SEP-based outage probability. As an example of application to digital mobile radio, the SEO in a log-normal shadowing environment is analyzed.