Transmit antenna selection for MIMO systems

In this paper we propose a scheme combining transmit antenna selection and maximal-ratio combining (MRC) at the receiver. In this scheme L antennas are chosen for transmission among all available transmit antennas N and maximal-ratio combining is performed at the receiver side. The pairwise error probability (PEP) of the scheme is derived in quasi-static Rayleigh fading channels. The analysis and simulation results show that, after L transmit antennas selection among all N available transmit antennas, though the diversity order is decreased to a certain extent, more diversity gain can still be obtained with our scheme compared with the case of no antenna selection, i.e. (L;M). And, this scheme significantly outperforms the space-time codes of the same diversity order with the same spectral efficiency.