Adaptive generalized selection combining (A-GSC) receivers

We introduce an adaptive generalized selection combining (A-GSC) receiver that can be efficiently applied in diversity rich fading environments such as in ultra-wideband applications. The branches that participate in the combining process are selected taking into account the quality of both the total combining output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the individual SNR of each branch. The proposed scheme achieves better adaptation to channel conditions compared to other competing schemes such as normalized threshold GSC (NT-GSC), minimum selection GSC (MS-GSC) or minimum estimation and combining GSC (MEC-GSC), with no further complexity. The A-GSC receiver compromises between the power consumption, hardware complexity and performance gain that each additional diversity branch induces, resulting in significant savings in power and computational resources.