Patent ID: 8526515

Claim:
A system for selecting an antenna from a plurality of antennas associated with a receiver, comprising: an antenna selection module for forwarding a control signal which triggers a switch from a currently active antenna of the receiver to a next antenna based on a predicted packet error rate (PER) associated with a current receive path of the receiver and a packet error history associated with at least one previous receive path, wherein the packet error history comprises at least one CRC error which corresponds to the at least one previous receive path and wherein the current receive path is used to process multi-carrier modulated signals received via the currently active antenna; a switch module for performing the switch from the currently active antenna to the next antenna based on the control signal; and a link quality metric module coupled to the antenna selection module for computing the predicted PER based on an effective mutual information (I eff ), wherein the effective mutual information (I eff ) takes account performances of components in the receiver, channel estimates, and noise variances associated with the multi-carrier modulated signals.