In this paper, we have analyzed the performance of correlated Nakagami-m fading channel by using the maximal-ratio-combing diversity at the receiver. A closed-form mathematical expression is derived for the average bit error rate (BER) for binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) and average symbol-error-rate (SER) for M-Quardrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) scheme in terms of the higher transcendental function such as Appell hypergeometric function by using the well-known moment generating function (MGF)-based approach with arbitrary fading index for the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communication systems. Moreover, we also derived an expression for the outage probability and the proposed numerical results are compared with the reported literature.