Performance analysis of output-threshold generalized selection combining in Rayleigh fading

In wireless communications, diversity combining is often employed to alleviate the deleterious effect of fading channels. As a variant of generalized selection combining (GSC), output thresholded GSC (OT-GSC) was proposed to minimize the processing power. Although extensive simulations were performed to evaluate the performance of OT-GSC in the existing literature, analytical results may be desirable to provide us with some insights into system design. In this paper, we present a closed-form expression for the error probability of OT-GSC over Rayleigh fading channels. Numerical examples are given to show that the analytical results are in excellent agreement with the Monte Carlo simulation results.