Precise error‐rate performance with distributed antenna selection transmission over Nakagami‐ m fading channels

Abstract

This study investigates the downlink error-rate performance for a multicell distributed antenna system (DAS) over Nakagami-m fading channels, where arbitrary number of remote antenna units are uniformly deployed within each macrocell. An antenna selection transmission scheme is presented to reduce the power consumption and the number of interfering signals from outside the target macrocell. Unlike most previous studies in which the interference plus noise is assumed to be Gaussian distributed with constant variance, the co-channel interference here is considered as a random variable. The authors first derive a closed-form bit error rate (BER) expression by adopting the commonly used Gaussian-Q-function approximation. Furthermore, consider the desired signal and the interfering signals undergo different fading severities, they derive a precise BER expression in terms of single-integral by applying the characteristic function. For the special case of Rayleigh fading, an exact closed-form BER expression is obtained. Finally, these error-rate expressions which can be evaluated efficiently indicate some significant insights into the characteristics of the antenna selection transmission for DAS. Simulation results are provided to validate their theoretical analysis.