Adaptive Receive Antenna Selection for Orthogonal Space-Time Block Codes with Imperfect Channel Estimation

Abstract

For coherent detection, decoding Orthogonal Space-Time Block Codes (OSTBC) requires full channel state information at the receiver, which basically is obtained by channel estimation. However, in practical systems, channel estimation errors are inevitable and may degrade the system performance more as the number of antennas increases. This letter shows that, using fewer receive antennas can enhance the performance of OS-TBC systems in presence of channel estimation errors. Furthermore, a novel adaptive receive antenna selection scheme, which adaptively adjusts the number of receive antennas, is proposed. Performance evaluation and numerical examples show that the proposed scheme improves the performance to a great extent.