Implementation of MRC diversity reception over Nakagami-m fading channel for ns-3 simulator

Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) exhibit a limited wireless transmission range due to the interference present in the channel and the packets lost due to transmission errors. Diversity reception is a common technique in many radio communication systems, fixed or mobile, which improves signal reception quality. Although Maximum Ratio Combining (MRC) is a well-known diversity technique, its implementation for the ns-3 network simulator has not been published in the open technical literature given its complexity. In this sense, the main contribution of this work is an inexpensive implementation of MRC diversity reception in the ns-3 network simulator. To this end, we have used a single Nakagami-m fading channel to model the resulting received signal after using MRC to the copies of the transmitted signal. The proposed implementation is then evaluated in the context of two classic scenarios. The first one is a static linear chain topology network, and the second one is a MANET scenario. The performance evaluation confirms the correct implementation of our proposal and shows significant improvements in terms of network transit time and packet delivery ratio.