Maximum Ratio Diversity Combining Receiver Using Single Radio Frequency Chain and Single Matched Filter

We present a new maximum ratio combining (MRC) technique that performs the maximum ratio combining at the radio frequency (RF) level, thereby requiring only one RF chain and one matched filter. We show that it can achieve the same performance as the conventional MRC technique that performs the combining at the baseband (post-detection), which requires multiple RF chains and multiple matched filters. The proposed approach can be extended to multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) system and significantly reduce the hardware complexity.