Performance Evaluation of Actual Multielement Antenna Systems Under Transmit Antenna Selection/Maximal Ratio Combining

In this letter, the performance of actual multielement antenna (MEA) systems under the transmit antenna selection/maximal ratio combining (TAS/MRC) technique is evaluated. An alternative version of an efficient, recently developed, stochastic electromagnetic methodology is employed to investigate the TAS/MRC performance of five MEA systems operating in the 5.2-GHz ISM band. The MEA systems are comprised two up to six printed antennas, and their performance is evaluated through the diversity gain (DG) at 1% outage probability level. Interestingly, DG degradation is revealed when the number of receiving antennas is six.