Switching rates of dual selection combining in Doppler fading channels

Diversity plays an important role in mitigating the effects of fading and improves the system performance during signal transmission over fading channels. Selection diversity is widely employed in receivers due to its economical and practical designs. In dual selection diversity combining, the receiver chooses one diversity branch with larger amplitude from two branches. The diversity switching rate is useful in evaluating receiver outages due to switching transients. Moreover, the diversity switching rate provides useful information in the design of phase estimation in coherent demodulation. Power is also a concern in mobile terminals since switching branches consumes power. In this thesis, analytical solutions for switching rates are derived for a dual selection combiner operating on: correlated Rayleigh and Rician fading channels in a noise-free environment; independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) kappa-mu and alpha-mu fading channels in the absence of noise; and independent Rayleigh and Rician fading channels with consideration of noise.