Source and relay transmit antenna selection in two hop cooperative communication systems over к-μ fading channels

Transmit antenna selection is a promising technique to simplify hardware and computational complexity of MIMO wireless communication systems. In this paper, we derive expressions for outage probability and bit error rate of two-hop relaying systems incorporated with transmit antenna selection at source and relay node. A closed form expression for outage probability and an infinite expression for bit error rate are derived for two hop cooperative communication system for BPSK modulation scheme. In the analysis, received signals are assumed to be collection of signals received as a result of multiple reflections having a line of sight component. Such channels can be well approximated by κ-μ fading distribution which is generalized assumption to model fading channels with a dominant or line of sight component. To analyze the performance of the system at high SNR conditions, the expression of asymptotic BER is also derived in closed form from the expression for exact BER. The transmit antenna is selected at the source and relay nodes such that the received signal to noise ratio at the destination node is maximized. Maximal ratio combining is considered at the relay and destination nodes. The bit error rate results obtained from analytical expressions and Monte Carlo simulations are plotted for different values of fading parameters, κ and μ. The analytical results are found to be in close agreement with simulation results.