Abstract: In recent years, there has been a growing interest in transmitting voice, data, image and video signals over wireless communication channels. In wireless telecommunications, multipath is the propagation phenomenon that results in radio signals reaching the receiving antenna by two or more paths. Reasons of multipath are scattering, atmospheric ducting, reflection from terrestrial objects, such as mountains and buildings and ionospheric reflection and refraction which results in constructive and destructive interference, and phase shifting of the signal. This deterioration of signals caused by multipath is termed as fading. In the present work, the BER performance has been investigated for Rayleigh and Rician fading channels.

Keywords: Multipath; diversity; Rayleigh fading; Rician fading; bit error rate.