Performance Analysis of a PASD Antenna System in Rayleigh Fading Channels

In this paper, we analyze the performance of a communication system that employs Protocol Assisted Switched Diversity (PASD) antennas under Rayleigh fading channel conditions. The PASD system accumulates time-displaced blocks, each with the same information but using different antennas, and then combines their symbols using maximal ratio combining (MRC). In the PASD system, quality of service (QoS) is ensured by comparing the available signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the output of the combiner against a preset threshold value. Our analysis shows that this method reduces the number of transmissions significantly as the channel deteriorates as compared with ARQ without memory while it can satisfy the symbol error rate (SER) requirement for most of blocks. It is also shown that deploying more than one antenna is important to stabilize the system when the channel becomes static.