Diversity gain

In wireless communications, diversity gain is the increase in signal-to-interference ratio due to some diversity scheme, or how much the transmission power can be reduced when a diversity scheme is introduced, without a performance loss. Diversity gain is usually expressed in decibel, and sometimes as a power ratio. An example is soft handoff gain. For selection combining N signals are received, and the strongest signal is selected. When the N signals are independent and Rayleigh distributed, the expected diversity gain has been shown to be $\sum_{k=1}^{N}\frac{1}{k}$, expressed as a power ratio.^[1]

See also

• Array gain
• Diversity combining

References

1. ^ D.G. Brennan, "Linear diversity combining techniques," Proc. IRE, vol.47, no.1, pp.1075–1102, June 1959