Outage Probability and Energy Efficiency of Cooperative MIMO with Antenna Selection

This paper compares the energy efficiency of some cooperative MIMO schemes in wireless networks. By energy efficiency we denote the spectral efficiency seen at the receiver normalized by the total energy consumption, which includes the circuitry, the efficiency of the power amplifier, and the transmission rate. We focus on transmit antenna selection (TAS) and switch and stay combining (SSC) at the receiver. The performance of TAS+SSC is compared to that of TAS and maximal ratio combining (MRC), and to that of transmit/receive beamforming using a singular value decomposition (SVD) technique. We derive closed-form outage probability expressions, and analyze the effect of selecting the antenna from the source to optimize the communication with the relay or with the destination. Our results show that selecting the antennas with respect to the destination is in general a better option when the energy consumption is accounted. Moreover, some power allocation strategies are described and the comparison of the schemes in terms of energy efficiency reveals a considerable improvement with the use of TAS+SSC for low to moderate spectral efficiency, while beamforming outperforms the other schemes for high spectral efficiency when the number of antennas at each node is small.