Error performance analysis of multi-hop space shift keying with transmit antenna selection

In this paper, symbol error probability analysis is performed for multihop space shift keying (SSK) system with transmit antenna selection (TAS). In this scheme, SSK is applied on the selected antennas at each hop. It assumed that there is no line of sight transmission between the source and the destination and each receiving terminal decodes and forwards the received signal from the previous terminal and maps the decided information bits to the selected antennas according to SSK technique. For the proposed system, approximate and asymptotic symbol error probabilities are calculated and the theoretical results are verified by computer simulations. It is shown that the proposed system provides better error performance than the multihop SSK system without TAS, and it is also indicated that the proposed system outperforms conventional M-QAM system for especially high data rates and sufficient number of receive antennas at the destination.