Performance analysis of source transmit antenna selection in space shift keying with cooperative amplify-and-forward relaying

In this paper, we propose a cooperative relaying scheme combining space shift keying (SSK) and transmit antenna selection (TAS), and investigate its error performance. In this scheme, source TAS is performed based on the channel fading coefficients corresponding to source-destination, source-relay and relay-destination links. SSK is applied by using the selected antennas. Moreover, a single-antenna relay is used to amplify the transmitted signal from the source and forward it to the destination. Considerably tight upper-bound and lower-bound expressions for the bit error probability of the proposed SSK system are derived when the number of selected antennas is two. It is demonstrated that the proposed SSK scheme outperforms conventional cooperative SSK scheme without source TAS and also the cooperative SSK scheme in which a single-antenna decode-and-forward relay is used and source-destination channel-based TAS is adopted.