Improving the performance of switched diversity with post-examining selection

Switched diversity offers one of the lowest complexity solution for fading mitigation. The receiver employing switched combining schemes seeks and uses an acceptable diversity path for data reception. However, when no acceptable path is found after all paths have been examined, the receiver ends up randomly choosing an unacceptable path. In this paper, we consider the performance improvement of switched combining schemes. In particular, we modify conventional multi-branch switch and examine combining (SEC) schemes in a way that the best path is selected when no acceptable path is found after all paths have been examined. We carry out a thorough performance versus complexity tradeoff study on the resulting scheme: SEC with post-examining selection and illustrate the study with some selected numerical examples.