Generalized selection combining with log-likelihood ratio threshold test per path for Rake reception in ultra-wideband communications

In this paper, we propose a generalized selection combining (GSC) scheme to provide proper path selection for UWB Rake receivers with limited number of fingers. This scheme alleviates the need to estimate all received paths for path selection by setting an adaptive threshold for the log-likelihood ratio (LLR) of each path, accounting for the noise level, channel estimation errors and the number of Rake fingers available. The simulation results reveal that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms SNR-GSC and performs comparably to |LLR|-GSC.