Performance of coherent receivers with hybrid SC/MRC over Nakagami-m fading channels

A performance analysis of two hybrid selective combining/maximal ratio combining (SC/MRC) diversity receivers over Nakagami-m (1960) fading channels with a flat multipath intensity profile is presented and numerically compared with that of the conventional SC and MRC schemes. Numerical results for particular cases of interest show that the bit error rate (BER) degradation arising from the use of hybrid SC/MRC instead of MRC is independent of the average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regardless of the severity of the fading and that MRC provides a higher rate of improvement than the hybrid SC/MRC as the severity of fading decreases.