Performance Analysis of Thresholded MRC Scheme for Cooperative Diversity under Rayleigh Fading Channel

Cooperative diversity is a promising technology for future wireless networks. Diversity combining greatly improves the performance of wireless communication systems in fading environments. However it also increase the power consumption of the receiver. In this paper, we investigate variants of known diversity combining schemes that minimize the processing power at the receiver while still providing considerable performance improvement. In particular we carry out a thorough performance versus power consumption trade off analysis of threshold maximum ratio combining (TMRC). Numerical examples show that output thresholded combining schemes lead to considerably less average power consumption than conventional schemes while providing nearly the same performance.