Performance analysis and realization of decision fusion for macroscopic diversity in cellular wireless systems

This paper analyzes the performance of the adaptive fusion method for macroscopic diversity combination in the wireless cellular environment when the error probability information from each base station detection is not available. The performance analysis includes the derivation of the minimum achievable error probability. An alternative realization with lower complexity of the optimal fusion scheme by using selection diversity is also proposed. The selection of the information bit in this realization is obtained either from the most reliable base station or through the majority rule from the participating base stations. The performance comparison in Rayleigh fading and log-normal shadowing shows that this method has much better performance over conventional macroscopic selection diversity.