Channel quality estimation index (CQEI): A long-term performance metric for fading channels and an application in EGC receivers

We introduce the Channel Quality Estimation Index (CQEI) as an alternative improved long-term performance criterion for wireless communications systems operating over fading channels. CQEI is simple to evaluate, since it depends on the channel statistics which vary much more slowly than the channel state itself, and thus can be obtained at the initialization state using a long training sequence and afterwards continuously improved during the whole communication period. Considering generalized fading channels (Nakagami-m, Nakagami-n, Nakagami-q) and a variety of modulations, we show that CQEI assesses the average error performance of a communication system more efficiently, compared to other long-term performance criteria such as the average signal to noise ratio (ASNR) and the amount of fading (AoF). As an application, we utilize CQEI to present a new class of equal gain combining (EGC) receivers operating over non-identical independent fading channels, called selection-EGC (S-EGC). This kind of receivers reduces or eliminates the combining loss by rejecting the weak branches that contribute more to increasing the noise than the signal during the combining stage. S-EGC could be efficiently applied in the emerging broadband communication systems (e.g., ultra-wideband), where the number of diversity paths can be considerably large due to the strong multipath effects. Numerical results show that the new proposed selection-EGC (S-EGC) receiver outperforms the classical one, when fading with nonidentically distributed diversity branches is assumed.