Adaptive transmit antenna selection with pragmatic space-time trellis codes

We consider the problem of selecting a subset of transmit antennas in MIMO systems to minimize error probability when only partial channel information is available at the transmitter. An upper bound for error probability of space-time coded transmit antenna selection scheme conditioned on the channel state information is presented. Based on the performance analysis, a criterion of selecting a subset of available transmit antennas to minimize the upper bound on the PEP is proposed. In contrast to other transmit antenna selection schemes for uncoded transmission or with a fixed number of antennas within the selection subset in the literature, the proposed scheme can adaptively select both a variable number of transmit antennas and their corresponding space-time codes for transmission. Furthermore, we present pragmatic space-time trellis coding schemes for slow Rayleigh fading channels. The principal advantage of the schemes is that a single encoder and decoder can be used for systems with a variable number of transmit antennas. The performance of the pragmatic space-time codes with adaptive antenna selection and the effect of the imperfect channel estimation on performance are evaluated by simulations. It is shown that the adaptive selection offers considerable antenna selection gain relative to the antenna selection system with a fixed number of antennas within the selection subset.