A low complexity antenna diversity receiver for OFDM based systems

A low complexity antenna diversity architecture with a new combining technique suitable for orthogonal frequency division (OFDM) based systems is introduced in this paper. For a two branch antenna diversity, this structure requires only one FFT at the receiver and allows optimum maximum ratio combining. For systems with a higher number of antennas, the number of required FFTs when using such technique is reduced by half as compared to the conventional case where a different FFT is used for each receive antenna. As a result a considerable reduction in processing complexity is obtained especially for systems with high number of subcarriers. This method can also be seen as a way of increasing the number of antennas in OFDM transceivers without any major complexity increase. Thus, a considerable increase in diversity gain can be achieved.