Antenna selection for space-time trellis codes in fast fading

In this paper, we derive explicit upper bounds on the pairwise-error probability (PEP) for space-time trellis codes (STTCs) with receive antenna selection over fast fading channels. In performing antenna selection, we adopt a selection criterion that is based on selecting L out of the available M receive antennas that result in maximizing the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver, where L ≤ M. We show that the resulting diversity order deteriorates significantly and becomes a function of the number of selected antennas. The implication of this result is that adding more receive antennas, while maintaining the same number of selected ones, will have no impact on the diversity order, but it does, however, provide some additional coding gain. This is unlike the case for quasistatic fading channels in which the diversity order is always preserved with antenna selection when the underlying space-time code is full-rank. We also present simulation results that support our analysis.