Gain Control for Diversity Receivers

A good part of detection theory literature deals with the determination of statistically optimum or near optimum receiver structures. However, in any practical implementation of these receivers the signal processing must be performed by components of finite dynamic range. To effectively use the amplitude range of a signal processing chain it is common to scale the received signal by adjusting the receiver gain. Optimum gain settings for minimum average cost of excluding (from a receiver's finite dynamic range) the envelope of a narrowband signal plus gaussian noise were presented last year. 1 Here similar results are presented for an important class of diversity receivers used for comunications through fading media and for radar. For the single diversity (M = 1) case, these results reduce to those given previously.