Transmit antenna selection for MIMO systems

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 quasistatic 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.