The University of British Columbia

Using a circular contour integral representation for the generalized Marcum-Q function, Qm(a,b), we derive a new closed-form formula for the moment generating function (MGF) of the output signal power of a dual-diversity selection combiner (SC) in bivariate Nakagami-m fading with positive integer fading severity index. This result involves only elementary functions and holds for any value of the ratio a/b in Qm(a,b). As an aside, we show that previous trigonometric integral representations for Qm(a,b) can be obtained directly from this contour integral. The MGF is used to unify the evaluation of average error performance and outage performance of a dual-branch SC for coherent, differentially coherent and noncoherent communications systems