Enhancing switched diversity systems

Switched diversity systems in correlated fading channels are considered. A procedure for decorrelating the diversity branches, prior to the switching process, is proposed. The performance of the proposed approach is compared to that without decorrelation for various switching strategies. It is shown that as a result of the decorrelation process, both outage probability and mean switching rate decrease, while the average SNR at selector output increases. Decorrelation is achieved by applying the Karhunen Loeve transform to the antennas outputs.