A Novel Combining Receiver for a Dual-Diversity Wireless Relay Network

We present a simple combining receiver for a dual-diversity wireless relay network. The main concern of the paper is to face the trade-off between performance and complexity. The receiver focuses on signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) monitoring and selects dynamically between selection combining (SC) and equal gain combining (EGC) depending on the SNR ratio of the two received branches. It is shown that SC suffers no SNR degradation compared to a single branch communications system if the two receive branches are unbalanced, wheres EGC suffers a loss of 3 dB. Error performance with respect to branch unbalance is considered as well and limiting values for a high degree of branch unbalance are derived.