Unified Analysis of Transmit Antenna Selection/Space-Time Block Coding with Receive Selection and Combining over Nakagami-m Fading Channels in the Presence of Feedback Errors

Examining the effect of imperfect transmit antenna selection (TAS) caused by the feedback link errors on the performance of hybrid TAS/space-time block coding (STBC) with selection combining (SC) (i.e., joint transmit and receive antenna selection (TRAS)/STBC) and TAS/STBC (with receive maximal-ratio combining (MRC)-like combining structure) over Nakagami-m fading channels is the main objective of this paper. Under ideal channel estimation and delay-free feedback assumptions, statistical expressions and several performance metrics related to the post-processing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are derived for a unified system model concerning both joint TRAS/STBC and TAS/STBC schemes. Exact analytical expressions for outage probability and bit/symbol error rates (BER/SER) of binary and M-ary modulations are presented in order to provide an extensive examination on the capacity and error performance of the unified system that experiences feedback errors. Also, the asymptotic diversity order analysis, which shows that the diversity order of the investigated schemes is lower bounded by the diversity order provided by STBC transmission itself, is included in the paper. Moreover, all theoretical results are validated by performing Monte Carlo simulations. Keywords— Space-Time Block Coding (STBC); Transmit Antenna Selection (TAS); Receive Antenna Selection (RAS); Maximal-ratio Combining (MRC); Selection Combining (SC); Nakagami-m fading; Feedback Errors