Postdetection maximal ratio combining diversity receiver with scalar phase signals

This paper proposes 2-branch and 4-branch postdetection maximal ratio combining (MRC) diversity receivers that offer sufficient diversity gain and sharply reduced hardware size. The proposed receivers utilize the scalar phase signals, which are the output signal of the demodulator of each branch, and some ROM tables. No multipliers, which require a large hardware size, are used. Computer simulation results show that the proposed 2-branch MRC diversity receiver reduces the hardware size to less than 30% compared to the 2-branch phase combining diversity receiver, which achieves almost the same diversity gain while reducing the hardware size compared to the conventional 2-branch MRC diversity receivers, and the E/sub b//N/sub o/ degradation at a bit error rate (BER) of 10/sup -3/ is less than 0.2 dB from the ideal BER performance. The proposed 4-branch MRC diversity receiver reduces the hardware size to less than 10% compared to the conventional 4-branch MRC diversity receivers and its E/sub b//N/sub o/ degradation at a BER of 10/sup -3/ is about 0.6 dB.