An Analytical Study of the Impact of Arbitrary Receive Antenna Correlation in TAS/MRC

Abstract

Novel closed-form expressions are derived for the performance analysis of a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system in Rayleigh fading using transmit antenna selection (TAS) at the transmitter and maximal ratio combining (MRC) at the receiver. Receive antennas are assumed to be arbitrarily correlated, as no restriction is imposed on the correlation matrix. General exact and asymptotic expressions to evaluate the bit error rate (BER) of different modulation schemes are presented for uncoded transmission, and a closed-form expression is presented for the channel capacity. It is demonstrated that channel capacity may improve due to correlation at the receive antennas if the transmit array size is large enough as a result of a higher signal variability and the antenna selection performed at the transmitter. Monte Carlo simulations have been carried out to validate the analysis, showing an excellent agreement with the theoretical results.