Performance bounds for combined channel coding and space-time block coding with receive antenna selection

This paper studies the performance of the concatenation of an outer channel code with an orthogonal space-time block code (STBC), where the outer code can be a convolutional code (CC) or a trellis-coded modulation (TCM) code. In particular, upper bounds on the bit error rate (BER) for this concatenation scheme with receive antenna selection are derived. In the analysis, the authors assume that 1) the receiver uses only L out of the available M receive antennas, where, typically, L <= M; 2) the selected antennas are those that maximize the instantaneous received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR); 3) the channel state information is perfectly known at the receiver; 4) the underlying channel is fully interleaved; and 5) the underlying orthogonal STBC is full rate. An explicit upper bound on the BER for the above concatenation scheme for any N, M, and L is derived, where N denotes the number of transmit antennas. It has been shown that the diversity order with antenna selection is the same as that of the full-complexity system, whereas the deterioration in SNR is upper bounded by 10 log(10)(M/L) dB. The authors also derive a tighter upper bound on the BER for the Alamouti scheme when the receiver uses the best antenna, i.e., L = 1. These upper bounds can be extended in a straightforward manner to other types of outer codes and fading channels, including fast, block, and slow fading channels. Finally, simulation results that validate the analysis are derived.