Robust transmit antenna selection with phase feedback over correlated fading channels

A new transmit antenna selection (TAS) scheme with phase feedback for multiple-input multiple-output systems is proposed in this paper. This scheme allows two or more transmit antennas to simultaneously use one radio frequency chain. By grouping the transmit antennas according to their similarities in instantaneous channel coefficients into two subsets and treating each subset as a single antenna, both hardware complexity reduction and antenna array gain can be achieved. Compared with the transmit antenna selection combined with space-time block code (TAS/STBC) scheme, the proposed TAS scheme provides excellent robustness, in terms of symbol error rate performance, against spatially correlated fading channels. Moreover, the proposed TAS scheme need not use STBC encoder and decoder which used in the TAS/STBC schemes. Therefore, the proposed TAS scheme is simpler than the TAS/STBC schemes in practical hardware implementation. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York.