An upper bound on the SER of transmit beamforming in correlated rayleigh fading

Abstract

We study the symbol error rate (SER) of maximum ratio transmission, transmit antenna selection, and codebook-based beamforming in correlated Rayleigh fading channels. Assuming maximum ratio combining is performed at the receiver, we derive a universal upper bound on the average SER of the three schemes, and prove that the bound is asymptotically tight in high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regions. However, numerical results show that at medium SNR, the tightness of the bound depends on the condition number of the channel correlation matrix.