A diode is a one-port device. Mixers rely on the LO being much larger than the mixture of signals, so that the LO dominates the signals and drives the diodes as much like switches as possible.
The period while the diodes are transitioning between the 'as much off as the drive allows' and the 'as much on as the drive allows' is when they are most amenable to having their switching time modulated by incoming signals. Hence intermodulation.
So we want to get the diodes to go as quickly as possible between the saturated states. If you read data from packaged diode ring mixer manufacturers, they offer mixers with better intermod performance at higher LO drive levels. Essentially they employ measures to increase the LO level at which damage occurs and you have to provide the LO power.
All this assumes sinewave LO.
But the benefit of the higher power becomes more a case of the speed in crossing the active region and less in how hard they are turned on/off.
Having a squarewave drive has the faster dV/dt to get across the transition, but doesn't apply as much heat and stress as a sine with a comparable dV/dt.
Making the LO drive a current source rather than a voltage source also helps manage stress and can lead to a faster transition.
So that's how to soup up a diode ring mixer to the hilt. Guy Douglas wrot it up in the HP journal in April 1982
http://vtda.org/pubs/HP_Journal/HP_Journal_1982-04.pdf
Racal had done a mixer for their RA1772 HF receiver based on a 1968 paper by P R Rafuse which embedded DMOS FETs in a ring like the diodes used. In this they missed a massive trick. The MOSFETs are TWO port devices and give separation of LO and signal paths. There is no need to use the circuit topology optimised for one-port devices.
Several people eventually saw the next step. A colleague at HP came up with it as a suggestion and it got used. A little later someone else contributed it to the 'Tech Topics' column in RADCOM. He named it the 'H-mode Mixer' and it's worth looking at.
David