Receive antenna selection for space-time block codes

In this paper we derive upper bounds on the bit error rate (BER) performance of orthogonal space-time block codes (STBC) with receive antenna selection. In our analysis, we assume that the receiver uses only L out of the available M receive antennas, where, typically, L ≤ M. The selected antennas are those that maximize the instantaneous received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We show that the diversity order with antenna selection is maintained as that of the full complexity system, whereas the deterioration in SNR is upper bounded by 10log₁₀(M/L) dB. Furthermore, we derive an expression for the exact BER performance for the Alamouti (1998) scheme when L = 1. Finally, we present simulation results that validate our analysis.