Question

Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC)

Simulate a system with a single transmit and two receive antennas (L=2). Assume that the maximal ratio combing (MRC) scheme MRC is employed at the receiver. You are asked to find the bit error probability of this scheme and compare it with the result of Part 1 as well as the theoretical error probability. Additionally, increase the number of receive antennas to L = 4 and compare with L = 2 and L = 1 (no receive diversity). You need to plot the results and discuss them.
Hints for simulation:
1. To get independent paths, you need to generate path coefficient, hi, as many as the number of receive antennas you have, i.e., L.
h_real = sqrt(0.5)*randn(L, blck_size);
h_imag = sqrt(0.5)*randn(L, blck_size);
h = h_real + 1i* h_imag;

Answer 1

The student is asked to simulate a wireless communication system with single transmit and multiple receive antennas using Maximal Ratio Combining and to compare the bit error probabilities for different numbers of antennas.

Step-by-step explanation:

The question involves the simulation of a wireless communication system using Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC). MRC is a diversity combining technique where multiple antenna signals are combined in the receiver to improve the signal to noise ratio. The simulation involves comparing the bit error probability when using different numbers of receive antennas (L = 1, L = 2, and L = 4).

To simulate the system, one needs to create independent path coefficients (h) for each receive antenna by generating random variables for the real and imaginary parts of h. This is done using Gaussian distributions. After simulating the system and finding the bit error probabilities, the results should be plotted to compare performance with different numbers of antennas. The expectation is that increasing the number of antennas will lead to a decrease in the bit error probability, signifying improved system performance due to diversity gain.