Design of Simple and Efficient Multi-branch Selection Combining System

To overcome the performance limit of multi-branch switch and stay combining (SSC) systems, the branches are divided into a pair of sub-SSC systems that are connected to selection combining. To evaluate the proposed system, the general mathematical expressions of average output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for the independent Nakagami-m fading branches are provided. There are deduced for the case in which one branch has higher or lower average SNR than the other branches. We also perform a numerical analysis, and demonstrate that this simple structure reconfiguration considerably increases the performance of SSC systems in several environments.