A power-saving implementation of generalized selection combining by output thresholding

Generalized selection combining (GSC) delivers the largest possible diversity benefit for a given hardware-complexity constraint. However, it also increases the power consumption of the receiver with the path selection and the maximum ratio combining (MRC) operations. In this paper, we investigate a variant of GSC, termed output thresholded GSC (OT-GSC). More specifically, to reduce the power consumption of the GSC scheme, we introduce a threshold check at the GSC combiner output. The resulting OT-GSC combiner tries to raise the signal to noise ratio of the combined signal above a threshold by using the least combiner resources (in terms of path estimations and active MRC branches) possible. The tradeoff between power consumption and performance is illustrated with selected numerical examples.