Performance of super-orthogonal space-time trellis codes with transmit antenna selection

Super-orthogonal space-time trellis (SOSTT) codes provide a significant coding gain with respect to the conventional space-time trellis (STT) codes without increasing the decoding complexity at the receiver. Transmit antenna selection (TAS) is an important technique to solve the implementation complexity problems of multiple-antenna systems that arise from employing a separate RF chain for each antenna. This study treats a scheme combining SOSTT coding with TAS in order to exploit performance improvements provided by SOSTT codes while realising the promises made by the TAS technique. In the proposed scheme, transmit antennas that maximise the signal-to-noise ratio at the receiver are chosen and activated out of all available transmit antennas for transmission of the baseline SOSTT code, whereas all other transmit antennas are silent. The error performance of the proposed structure is investigated by deriving moment generating function (MGF)-based upper bound expressions on the pairwise error probability in quasi-static flat Rayleigh fading channels for both perfect and imperfect antenna subset selection. The performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme provides full diversity order as if all transmit antennas were used when antennas are perfectly selected. Moreover, it is shown that this structure provides better error performance almost at the same decoding complexity compared to the previous STT coding structures with TAS in the literature.