Performance analysis for ordered selection combining schemes in Nakagami-m environments

Ordered statistics is applied in this paper to analyze the performance of ordered selection combining schemes with different modulation receptions operating in Nakagami-m fading environments. The ordered selection combining will be adapted to include the conventional selection combining (SC), the second-order diversity combining (SC-2), and the third-order diversity combining (SC-3). All the results are validated by comparing the special case Rayleigh distribution with the fading figure m = 1 in the Nakagami-m distribution. The results show that SC is in performance the worst in both coherent and non-coherent schemes, as expected. The performance differences between SC-2 and MRC, and SC-3 and EGC are not significant when the diversity order L ⩽ 3 , but the differences will increase when L ⩾ 5 .