Re: Fading Channels
A wireless signal will be subject to many phenomena during transmission, such as reflection, scattering, etc. This leads to the decomposition of the signal into several copies, each with different power level, noting that the sum of the powers of those signals is equal to the power of the original signal. Anyway, several copies of this signal will arrived at the receiver but with different phase delays (thus in some cases the copies of the signal may cancel each other). Therefore a rake receiver is used for two purposes: the first to accumulate the power of these copies into one signal; and the second is to make all the received copies so they can be added together. For that purpose, the receiver waits a period of time to collect the delayed multi-copies of the signal.
Regards