Exact performance analysis of minimum-selection generalized selection combining (GSC)

Diversity combining techniques improve the performance of wireless communication systems at the cost of increased processing 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 combined SNR with MS-GSC and we then apply these results to analyze the performance of MS-GSC over fading channels. We derive closed-form expressions for important performance measures, including outage probability and average error rate, for the Rayleigh fading scenario.