Antennas selection for MIMO systems over Rayleigh fading channels

We propose a scheme combining transmit antenna selection and maximal-ratio combining (MRC) at the receiver. L antennas are chosen for transmission among all N available transmit antennas, and MRC is performed at the receiver side. The pairwise error probability (PEP) of the scheme is derived in quasi-static Rayleigh fading channels in detail. The analysis and simulation results show that, after selection of L antennas 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).