Adaptive low power receive diversity for LTE

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the improvement of the 3G W-CDMA system and offers higher system capacity while being more robust against multipath fading. For this purpose it features several multiple antenna schemes. Receive diversity is a mandatory multiple antenna scheme. This paper proposes an architecture for receive diversity which significantly reduces the power consumption compared to conventional approaches. Depending on the environment it has a similar performance as maximum ratio combining while delivering a power saving of 30% in the radio frontend and allowing even better power reduction on system level. Minor modifications have to be made at the radio frontend. The performance of the proposed architecture is evaluated in multipath fading channels in terms of bit error rates.