New results on ordered statistics and analysis of minimum-selection generalized selection combining (GSC)

Diversity combining techniques improve the performance of wireless communication systems at the cost of increased power consumption. Minimum-selection generalized selection combining (MS-GSC) scheme has been proposed as a power saving implementation of conventional generalized selection combining (GSC) scheme. In this paper, noting that previous analytical results on the error rate of MS-GSC are approximate, we carry out a thorough and exact analysis for MS-GSC. In particular, based on a new result on order statistics, we obtain the statistics of the combined SNR with MS-GSC and we then apply these results to analyze the performance of MS-GSC over fading channels. We derive the closed-form expressions of important performance measures, including outage probability and average error rate, for the Rayleigh fading scenario. In addition, we investigate the average number of active MRC branches with MS-GSC, as a quantification of the power saving