ABSTRACT

Mobile communication systems employing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing technique are mainly the fourth and fifth generation. This technique serves as a multi-access scheme which supports information splitting in sub-channel frequencies during data transmission. This technique is sensitive to multipath fading and signal strength can be lost due to shadowing in different radio frequency propagation terrains during practical applications. One of the waysin mitigating this multipath fading problem is by utilizing antenna diversity combining techniques. In this paper, Simulink software is employed to analytically simulate three antenna diversity techniques, selection combining, equal gain combining and maximum ratio combining. Symbol error rate and bit error rate are used as performance indicators, the result indicates that the maximum ratio combining performs optimally. The results indicate that the performance of the three diversity techniques increases as the antenna grows in quantity.

Keywords: Bit error rate, symbol error rate, selection combining, equal gain combining, maximum ratio combining,