Performance Study of Transmit Antenna Selection With Switch-and-Examine Combining Over Rayleigh Fading

In this paper, we propose a diversity combining system with transmit antenna selection at the transmitter and switch-and-examine combining (TAS/SEC) at the receiver. This system has lower processing complexity as compared with the existing TAS systems such as TAS/maximum-ratio combining (TAS/MRC) and TAS/selection combining (TAS/SC). The performance of the TAS/SEC system with different modulation schemes over an independent and nonidentically distributed (i.n.d.) Rayleigh fading channel is investigated. The expressions of the outage probability, average output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and symbol error rate (SER) are derived and validated by simulation results. The performance of TAS/SEC is compared with TAS/SC in terms of the SER and the average number of branches to be estimated. It is shown that, as compared with TAS/SC, the TAS/SEC system is able to achieve a lower SER with fewer branches to be estimated.