Adaptive receive antenna selection for orthogonal space-time block codes with channel estimation errors

Decoding orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBC) requires channel state information at the receiver for coherent detection. However, in practical systems, channel estimation errors are inevitable and may degrade the system performance more as the number of antennas increases. This paper shows that, using less receive antennas probably enhances the performance of OSTBC systems in presence of channel estimation errors. Moreover, a novel adaptive receive antenna selection scheme, which adaptively adjusts the number of receive antennas, is proposed. Performance evaluation and numerical examples show that the proposed scheme improves the performance to a great extent.