  Despite being ubiquitous in practice, the performance of maximal-ratio
combining (MRC) in the presence of interference is not well understood. Because
the interference received at each antenna originates from the same set of
interferers, but partially de-correlates over the fading channel, it possesses
a complex correlation structure. This work develops a realistic analytic model
that accurately accounts for the interference correlation using stochastic
geometry. Modeling interference by a Poisson shot noise process with
independent Nakagami fading, we derive the link success probability for
dual-branch interference-aware MRC. Using this result, we show that the common
assumption that all receive antennas experience equal interference power
underestimates the true performance, although this gap rapidly decays with
increasing the Nakagami parameter $m_{\text{I}}$ of the interfering links. In
contrast, ignoring interference correlation leads to a highly optimistic
performance estimate for MRC, especially for large $m_{\text{I}}$. In the low
outage probability regime, our success probability expression can be
considerably simplified. Observations following from the analysis include: (i)
for small path loss exponents, MRC and minimum mean square error combining
exhibit similar performance, and (ii) the gains of MRC over selection combining
are smaller in the interference-limited case than in the well-studied
noise-limited case.
