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MRC - Maximum Ratio Combining

In a Rayleigh fading channel, the MRC performance is the best, followed by EGC, and then SD.

The performance of MRC is the same as that of EGC if signals from each path are of equal strength.

The selection of the signal component may be pre-detection or post-detection, meaning that the selection of the received signals could be before the demodulation or after the demodulation.

There are two ways to achieve combining: at the chip level and at the symbol level. Symbol-level combining combines the signals of different paths at the symbol level.

The descrambling and despreading are performed before combining in order to convert chip-level signals into chip/symbol rate combining symbol-level signals.

Symbol level combining: