Analysis of Threshold-Based Selection Diversity Receivers

Selection diversity (SD) represents an attractive solution in various wireless communication scenarios, since it offers relatively low complexity and improved performance. However, in many practical situations the continuously monitoring of all the available diversity paths, which is mandatory in SD schemes, adds unnecessary overhead to the systems. In this paper, in order to alleviate this complexity, a new threshold-based SD (t-SD) receiver is proposed. In particular, in t-SD, the current path is used as long as its signal to noise ratio is above a predefined threshold, otherwise the receiver becomes a pure SD. For this new concept we present an analytical framework for important statistical metrics accompanied by a complexity analysis. Various numerical evaluated results illustrate that the proposed scheme outperforms other well known schemes in terms of the performance and complexity trade off.