Effects of channel-estimation errors on receiver selection-combining schemes for Alamouti MIMO systems with BPSK

The bit-error rate (BER) of binary phase-shift keying in Rayleigh fading, using the Alamouti transmission scheme and receiver selection diversity in the presence of channel-estimation error, is studied. Closed-form expressions for the BER of log-likelihood ratio selection, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) selection, switch-and-stay combining selection, and maximum ratio combining are derived in terms of the SNR and the cross-correlation coefficient of the channel gain and its corrupted estimate. Two new selection schemes, space-time sum-of-squares combining selection diversity and space-time sum-of-magnitudes selection diversity, are proposed and proven to provide almost the same performance as SNR selection, but with much simpler implementations. The effects of channel-estimation errors on each selection scheme are examined.