MRC and GSC diversity combining with an output threshold

Diversity combining greatly improves the performance of wireless communication systems in fading environment. However, it also increases the power consumption of the receiver. In this paper, we investigate variants of known diversity combining schemes that minimize the processing power at the receiver while still providing considerable performance improvement. In particular, we carry out a thorough performance versus power consumption tradeoff analysis of output-thresholded versions of maximum ratio combining (MRC) and generalized selection combining (GSC) schemes. Numerical examples show that the output thresholded combining schemes lead to considerably less average power consumption than conventional schemes while providing nearly the same performance.