Outage performance analysis of transmit antenna selection in MIMO decode-and-forward relaying over Nakagami-m fading channels

Transmit antenna selection (TAS) has been considered as an effective technique to obtain the benefits of a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system while reducing the hardware complexity. In this paper, the outage performances of several TAS strategies in MIMO decode-and-forward (DF) relaying are investigated over independent and identically distributed (iid) Nakagami-m fading channels. In particular, the asymptotic outage probabilities of the TAS strategies are derived and the diversity orders are analyzed. The presented expressions are applicable to the TAS strategies with any number of transceiver antennas and a fading environment with arbitrary severity parameters m ≥ 0.5. The analytical results are validated through simulation experiments.