Ordered Statistic Analysis for Diversity Combining Schemes over Nakagami-m Fading Channel

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Order diversity combining technique is one of efficient methods to lower the complexity but not to significantly degrade performance. Recently, Eng and Milstein [1] proposed a novel order-combining technique, called the second order diversity combining (SC2) and third order diversity combining (SC3) and applied to Rayleigh fading channel. SC2 and SC3 schemes mean that the two (three) signals with the first two (three) largest amplitudes among the branches are chosen and coherently combined. However, when compared to Rayleigh distribution, the Nakagami-m distribution [10] provides a more general and versatile way to model wireless channel. For the reason, the bit error rate (BER) performance of proposed schemes were then analyzed with order statistic method and compared to the traditional diversity technique over Nakagami fading environment in this paper. The results are compared to maximal ratio combining (MRC), and conventional selection combining (SC) in coherent reception and to equal gain combining (EGC) in noncoherent reception. The results show that SC is in performance the worst for either in coherent or in noncoherent schemes, as expected. The performance differences between SC2 (SC3) and MRC (EGC) are not significant when the diversity order L ≤ 3, but the difference will increase when L ≥ 5. It is worth noting that the result of [1] is a special case with fading figure, m = 1. It is also observed the performance is much affected by the number of diversity branches L, the fading figure m, and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).