Performance of multichannel reception with transmit antenna selection in arbitrarily distributed Nagakami fading channels

We present exact expressions for the average bit error rate (BER) and symbol error rate (SER) of different modulation techniques of a wireless system with multiple transmit and receive antennas. The receive antennas are assumed to use maximal ratio combining (MRC) or post-detection equal gain combining (EGC), whereas the transmit antenna that maximizes the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is selected. Exact expressions of the moment generating function (MGF) of the output SNR and all its derivatives are also derived. We consider a Nakagami-m fading channel where the long-term SNR and fading parameters from the different transmit antennas are arbitrary and may be different from each other. For a given transmit antenna, the fading at the receive antennas is assumed to be independent and identically distributed (i.i.d). For the case when the Nakagami fading parameter m has an integer value in every channel, results are given in closed-form as a finite sum of simple terms. When fading parameters take any real value, our results are given in terms of the multivariate Lauricella hypergeometric function FA (n). Numerical results for the error rates of different modulation techniques are presented.. Our results are validated by Monte Carlo simulation.