RX Diversity means to have multiple antennas at the receiver.

There are basically three types of method to obtain RX Diversity:

  1. Selection Combining (SC): Here the receiver selects the best branch of all the receiver antennas and decodes the signal coming from that antenna. It is suboptimal and doesnt utilizes the energy of the signals from the other antennas.
  2. Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC): Here, the limitation of the SC technique is removed. In MRC, signals from all the antennas are weighted appropriately by the respective path gains and combined to get the maximum ratio of signal to noise. However this requires the knoledge of channel.
  3. Equal Gain Combining (EGC): It is a special case of MRC where the signals from all the antennas are weighted by the same amount and combined. This technique is easy but less efficient than MRC.