MRC diversity with an output threshold

Diversity combining technique greatly improves the performance of wireless communication systems in fading environment. However, it also increases the power consumption of the receiver. In this paper, we investigate a variant of the classical maximum ratio combining (MRC) scheme that minimizes the processing power at the receiver while still providing considerable performance improvement. In particular, we carry out a thorough performance versus power consumption tradeoff analysis of the output-thresholded MRC scheme. Numerical examples show that the output thresholded combining scheme leads to considerable less average power consumption than conventional MRC scheme while providing nearly the same performance.