Analysis of transmit antenna selection with output-threshold generalised selection combining over Rayleigh fading

In this study, the authors propose a diversity-combining scheme with transmit antenna selection (TAS) and output-threshold generalised selection combining (OT-GSC) receiver. It is shown that the proposed TAS/OT-GSC can achieve similar performance as compared to the TAS/GSC with a reduced number of channel estimates when the predetermined signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) threshold is optimised. The outage probability, average output SNR, and symbol-error rate (SER) expressions of the proposed TAS/OT-GSC scheme are derived and presented over independent and non-identically distributed Rayleigh-fading channels. The analytical expressions are validated by simulation results. The trade-off comparisons in terms of the SER and number of channel estimates between the TAS/OT-GSC and TAS/GSC are discussed. Lastly, the capacity between the TAS/OT-GSC and TAS/GSC is compared.