Nonregenerative MIMO Relaying With Optimal Transmit Antenna Selection

We derive optimal SNR-based transmit antenna selection rules at the source and relay for the nonregenerative half-duplex MIMO relay channel. While antenna selection is a suboptimal form of beamforming, it has the advantage that the optimization is tractable and can be implemented with only a few bits of feedback from the destination to the source and relay. We compare the bit error rate of optimal antenna selection at both the source and relay to other proposed beamforming techniques and propose methods for performing the necessary limited feedback.