Channel Hardening and the Scheduling Gain of Antenna Selection Diversity Schemes

For a multiple antenna system, we compute the asymptotic distribution of antenna selection gain when the transmitter selects the transmit antenna with the strongest channel. We use this to asymptotically estimate the underlying channel capacity distributions, and demonstrate that unlike multiple- input/multiple-output (MIMO) systems,the channel for antenna selection systems hardens at a slower rate, and thus a significant multiuser scheduling gain can exist. Additionally, even without this scheduling gain, it is demonstrated that transmit antenna selection systems outperform open loop MIMO systems at low signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) regimes, particularly for small number of receive antennas. This may have some implications on wireless system design, because most of the users in modern wireless systems have low SINRs.