Comparison of SC and MRC receiver complexity for three antenna diversity systems

Antenna diversity techniques are used in wireless systems to combat the effects of fading. Signals from multiple receiver antennas are combined to achieve an improved average SNR. maximal ratio combining (MRC) technique is known to give a better SNR gain than Selection Combining (SC) technique. This improved performance of MRC comes at the cost of multiple receiver chains which implies increased receiver complexity and cost. In this paper we compare SC with MRC for three antennas in terms of receiver area and power cost. We show that for the same bit-error rate (BER) performance, SC requires roughly 60% lesser area and 40% lesser power consumption.