On the Performance Analysis of Switched Diversity Combining Receivers over Fisher–Snedecor ℱ Composite Fading Channels

In some emerging wireless applications, such as wearable communication and low-power sensor network applications, wireless devices or nodes not only require simple physical implementation approaches but also require certain reliable receiver techniques to overcome the effects of multipath or shadowed fading. Switched diversity combining (SDC) systems could be a simple and promising solution to the above requirements. Recently, a Fisher–Snedecor ℱ composited fading model has gained much interest because of its modeling accuracy and calculation tractability. However, the performance of SDC systems over ℱ fading channels has not yet been analyzed in the open literature. To this end, this paper presents a systematic analysis of SDC systems over ℱ fading channels, including dual-branch switch-and-stay combining (SSC), multibranch switch-and examine combining (SEC), and SEC with post-examining selection (SECps) systems. We first investigate the statistical characteristics of univariate and bivariate ℱ distributions. Then, these statistical expressions are introduced into the above SDC systems and the statistical metrics of the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for these systems are deduced in different ℱ fading scenarios. Thirdly, certain exact and novel expressions of performance criteria, such as the outage probability, the average bit error probability and average symbol error probability, as well as the average channel capacity for SSC, SEC, and SECps are derived. To find the optimum performance, optimal analysis is performed for the independent and identically distributed cases. Finally, numerical evaluation and simulations are carried out to demonstrate the validity of the theoretical analysis under various ℱ fading scenarios. According to the obtained results, the multipath fading parameter has more influence on the performance of SDC systems than the shadowing parameter, the correlation coefficient, or the average SNR. Importantly, the SDC systems can provide switched diversity gains only when the switching threshold is not too large or too small compared to the average SNR.