Multibranch switch-and-stay diversity with a new switch statistic on wireless fading channels

A new switch-and-stay combining (SSC) scheme is proposed. In contrast to the traditional signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) based SSC, the new SSC scheme employs the magnitude of the product of the fading factor and matched-filter output as the switch statistic. To illustrate the receiver performance of the new SSC scheme, the bit error rate (BER) of BPSK signalling is derived for the independent but not necessarily identical Rayleigh fading channels. Numerical results based on the analytical result and simulation are presented. The simulation result validates the accuracy of the analysis. From the numerical comparison, the new SSC significantly outperforms the SNR-based SSC, and moreover it even has a better performance than the SNR-based selection combining (SC) for some range of the average SNR.