Mobile Channel Prediction with Application to Transmitter Antenna Selection for Alamouti Systems

Exploiting the full spatial diversity available in mobile wireless channels is most effective when some information about the channel is available at the transmitter. In many practical applications, such information is rapidly outdated and has limited realizable benefits. This note investigates the feasibility of linear fading prediction, applied to noisy channel estimates. The predictions are then used for antenna subset selection for space-time block coding. It is shown, using synthesized and measured channel data, that multidimensional prediction from short channel snapshots is unreliable for dense scattering channels. However, the use of parallel predictors can provide a significant increase in the diversity, and hence performance, achievable with antenna subset selection relative to outdated or no channel information at the transmitter.