A two-ray, small-scale fading model was recently proposed as a worst-case fading scenario for certain wireless sensor applications. Empirical data motivated this development for fading was found to be more severe than predicted by Rayleigh fading statistics, a behavior referred to as hyper-Rayleigh fading. Based on the two-ray model, we study the benefits of M-branch diversity in the context of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and bit-error rate (BER) performance metrics. While these results are well-known for Rayleigh fading, this work is the first analysis of diversity for the hyper-Rayleigh regime.
['Lu’ay Bakir', 'Jeff Frolik']
Diversity gains in two-ray fading channels