Performance Analysis of OT-MRC Over I.I.D. Nakagami and Non-I.I.D. Rayleigh Fading Channels

This paper presents the performance analysis of a conditional diversity combining scheme, which is called output-threshold maximum ratio combining (OT-MRC), over the independent identically distributed Nakagami-$m$with integer$m$and independent but not necessarily identically distributed Rayleigh fading channels. Based on the closed-form expressions for the statistics, the authors analyze the performance of the OT-MRC systems and compare it with that of the conventional MRC systems. They exploit the tradeoff between complexity and performance in this scheme over the Nakagami fading channels and see the effect of unbalance of the fading gains over multiple diversity branches on the performance of OT-MRC. They show, from some numerical examples, that the OT-MRC scheme, when compared with the MRC scheme, can reduce the complexity significantly without losing the required performance.