Unit II

Antenna Diversity
Topic:
• Diversity Combining
• Selective Combining
• Maximal Ratio Combining
• Equal Gain Combining
 Selective Combining
• With selective combining (SC), the branch yielding the highest signal-
to noise ratio is always selected. In this case, the diversity combiner in
Fig. 6.1 performs the operation

• For radio systems that use continuous transmission, SC is impractical

because it requires continuous monitoring of all diversity branches to
obtain the time-varying complex gains
• If such monitoring is performed, then it is probably better to use
maximal ratio combining, as discussed in the next section, since the
implementation is not that much more complicated and the
performance is better.
Fig. 6.1
Contd.
• However, in systems that use TDMA, a form of SC can sometimes be
implemented where the diversity branch is selected prior to the
transmission of a TDMA burst.
• The selected branch is then used for the duration of the entire burst.
• Such an approach is only useful if the channel does not change
significantly over a TDMA burst.
• So, In this section, however, we evaluate selection diversity under the
assumption of continuous branch selection.
Contd…
• With Rayleigh fading, the instantaneous received symbol energy-to-
noise ratio on the kth diversity branch has the exponential pdf

• Where is the average received branch symbol energy-to-noise ratio.

• With ideal SC, the branch with the largest symbol energy-to-noise
ratio is always selected so the instantaneous symbol energy-to-noise
ratio at the output of the selective combiner is
Contd…
• where L is the number of branches.
• If the branches are independently faded, then order statistics gives
the cumulative distribution function (cdf)

• Differentiating the above expression gives the pdf

Contd…
• The average symbol energy-to-noise ratio with SC is
Contd…
• Fig. 6.2 plots the cdf against the normalized symbol energy-to-noise
ratio Note that the largest diversity gain is obtained in going from to
and diminishing returns are obtained with increasing L. This is typical
for all diversity techniques.
Fig. 6.2
Contd…
• The bit error probability with slow fading is obtained by averaging
overthe pdf of For example, consider binary DPSK with differential
detection having the bit error probability
Hence, with SC
where we have used the binomial expansion
 MAXIMAL RATIO COMBINING
• With maximal ratio combining (MRC), the diversity branches are
weighted by their respective complex fading gains and combined.
• MRC realizes an ML receiver as we now show, the vector

• has the multivariate Gaussian distribution

Contd…
• where is the channel vector.
• From this expression, the ML receiver chooses the message vector
that maximizes the metric
Contd…
• Since is independent of the hypothesis as to which
was sent and the receiver just needs to maximize the
metric

• If signals have equal energy then the last term can be neglected, since
it is the same for all message vectors
This results in
 Equal Gain Combining
• Equal gain combining (EGC) is similar to MRC because the diversity
branches are co-phased,
• but different from MRC because the diversity branches are not weighted.
• In practice, such a scheme is useful for modulation techniques having
equal energy symbols, e.g., M-PSK.
• With signals of unequal energy, the complete channel vector
is required anyway and MRC might as well be
used.
• With EGC, the receiver maximizes the metric
• This metric can be rewritten in the alternate form
• The combiner in Fig 6.1 just generates the sum

• The vector is then applied to the metric computer shown in Fig. 6.4
with The reason for setting comes
from the assumption of equal energy signals.
• After co-phasing and combining, the envelope of the composite signal
is
• and the sum of the branch noise powers is The resulting symbol
energy to-noise ratio is
•Thanks…….