Power-saving MRC combiners for hard-decision receivers with BPSK modulation

Diversity combining is a well-known technique which is widely used to combat fading environments in wireless communication systems. However, it increases the power consumption of the receivers. In this paper, the power-saving circuit for the maximum-ratio combining (MRC) combiner of the hard-decision receiver with binary phase shift keying (BPSK) signaling is designed to reduce the power consumption of the MRC combiner. In this paper, the relative power reduction ratio of the proposed power-saving MRC combiner over independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Rayleigh fading channels is analyzed and the numerical results are also provided.