Performance evaluation of a novel M-detector for coherent receiver antenna diversity in a GSM-type mobile radio system

Powerful adaptive detectors such as the maximum-likelihood (ML) detector based on the Viterbi algorithm (VA) are required at the receivers for GSM type mobile radio systems in order to combat the effect of frequency-selective fading radio channels. The use of diversity techniques like receiver antenna diversity leads to a further improvement of the receiver performance. Hence, ML detectors for coherent receiver antenna diversity (CRAD) have attracted the attention of many authors. However, the complexity of the defector for CRAD can be considerably decreased when the VA is replaced with the M-algorithm, which is a suboptimum tree search algorithm. In the course of this paper, the M-detector is extended to CRAD in the case of maximal-ratio combining (MRC), equal-gain combining (EGC), and selection combining (SC), and its performance in GSM type mobile radio systems is studied by simulations using the radio channel models rural area (RA), typical urban (TU), and bad urban (BU) specified by COST 207. It is demonstrated that this novel M-detector for CRAD can perform similarly to the ML detector for CRAD thus being a favorable alternative