The University of British Columbia

In this paper, we provide a unified asymptotic symbol error rate (SER) analysis of linearly modulated signals impaired by fading and (possibly) non-Gaussian noise (and interference). The derived asymptotic closed-form results are valid for a large class of fading and noise processes. In particular, we show that for high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) the SER of linear modulation schemes depends on the Mellin transform of the probability density function (pdf) of the noise and the diversity gain of the fading channel. Since the Mellin transform can be readily obtained for all commonly encountered noise pdfs, the provided SER expressions are easy and fast to evaluate.