Receive maximal-ratio combining with outdated arbitrary transmit antenna selection in Nakagami-m fading

The use of transmit antenna selection algorithms in multiple-antenna systems enables significant reduction in implementation cost and complexity while maintaining acceptable performance. An attractive and quite flexible selection algorithm is to allow the receiver to pick any of the transmit antennas that can satisfy a predetermined performance target. Such an algorithm is referred to as the arbitrarily ordered transmit antenna selection algorithm. However, the effectiveness of transmit antenna selection is decreased by several propagation impairments over the feedback channel from the receiver to the transmitter. Of these impairments, the feedback channel time delay may impose a significant impact on the achieved performance. This paper aims to investigate the impact of this time delay on the performance of receive maximal-ratio combining (MRC) diversity employing the arbitrarily ordered transmit antenna selection algorithm. In order to obtain quantitative measures for this impact, new expressions for various performance criteria are obtained by using the new derived formulas for the probability density function (pdf) and the moment generating function (MGF) of the combined signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Numerical and simulation results are presented to illustrate the effect of delayed (i.e. outdated) feedback information on the system performance for various transmit antenna selection scenarios.