Environment-Adaptive Receivers: A Performance Prediction Approach

The increase of hardware processing capabilities together with the forthcoming introduction of several receive antennas on handsets offer mobile terminals the ability to set up various receivers within the same architecture, each receiver being matched to specific radio conditions and/or a particular power consumption level. This paper addresses the problem of selecting the most appropriate receiver in a dynamic and autonomous way, according to the current radio conditions and possibly to a performance/complexity trade-off. To this end, we propose a low-complexity method allowing the terminal to predict the output SINR of various linear receivers without activating any of them. This feature allows the terminal to select the most appropriate receiver among a high number of candidate receivers, based on a reliable estimation of their respective performance in the current environment. Moreover, we introduce a simple method allowing the terminal to select the receiver according to a performance/complexity trade-off. The relevance and the efficiency of the proposed method are demonstrated by means of Monte-Carlo simulations in realistic WCDMA mobile network radio environments.