Switched diversity receivers over generalized gamma fading channels

A versatile envelope distribution which generalizes several commonly used fading models is the generalized Gamma (GG) distribution. This letter deals with the performance analysis of switch and stay combining (SSC) receivers operating over not necessarily identical GG fading channels. For these receivers, novel analytical expressions for the moments of the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) (including average SNR and amount of fading), outage probability, average bit error probability (ABEP), and Shannon average spectral efficiency (ASE) are derived. Moreover, closed-form expressions are obtained for the optimal average SNR, ABEP, and ASE switching thresholds. Special cases of the derived expressions agree with known results.