Rate of Channel Hardening of Antenna Selection Diversity Schemes and Its Implication on Scheduling

Abstract: For a multiple antenna system, we compute the asymptotic distribution of antenna selection gain when the transmitter selects the transmit antenna with the strongest channel. We use this to asymptotically estimate the underlying channel capacity distributions, and demonstrate that unlike multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) systems, the channel for antenna selection systems hardens at a slower rate, and thus a significant multiuser scheduling gain can exist - O(1/ log m) for channel selection as opposed to O(1/ sqrt{m}) for MIMO, where m is the number of transmit antennas. Additionally, even without this scheduling gain, it is demonstrated that transmit antenna selection systems outperform open loop MIMO systems in low signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) regimes, particularly for a small number of receive antennas. This may have some implications on wireless system design, because most of the users in modern wireless systems have low SINRs