A Blind Hammerstein Diversity Combining Technique for Flat Fading Channels

Diversity combining techniques play an important role in combating the destructive effects of channel fading in wireless communication systems. In this work we present a blind diversity combining technique for Rayleigh flat fading channels based on Hammerstein type filters. We show that the performance of this technique is very close to ideal MRC system which is accepted as an optimum receiver over fading channels in presence of AWGN. This is a valuable result especially because higher bandwidth efficiency is also achieved as compared with MRC. We also show that in our proposed technique the variation of the combiner output values around the values of transmitted symbols is less than the corresponding variation in MRC system. Hence, for soft decision applications it is superior to MRC technique.