Antenna selection has arisen as an attractive strategy in multi-antenna systems due to its reduced complexity and cost. In this paper, the outage performance of a distributed transmit antenna selection scheme for dual-hop fixed-gain amplify-and-forward relaying systems is investigated. Our analysis considers a multi-antenna source, a multi-antenna relay, and a single-antenna destination, in which selection combining and maximal-ratio combining are employed at the relay and destination receptions, respectively. Lower and upper bounds for the outage probability of the proposed scheme are derived as the sum of two terms, one term given in closed form and the other term given in single integral form. Moreover, asymptotic expressions for these bounds at high signal-to-noise ratio are obtained in closed form. The results show that our scheme presents full diversity order. More importantly, the underlying distributed strategy is shown to perform closely to the costly optimal centralized antenna selection. © 2014 ICST. 254259Sanayei, S., Nosratinia, A., Antenna selection in MIMO systems (2004) IEEE Commun. Mag., 42 (10), pp. 68-73. , OctPeters, S., Heath, R., Nonregenerative MIMO relaying with optimal transmit antenna selection (2008) IEEE Signal Process. Lett., 15, pp. 421-424Amarasuriya, G., Tellambura, C., Ardakani, M., Performance analysis framework for transmit antenna selection strategies of cooperative MIMO AF relay networks (2011) IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol., 60 (7), pp. 3030-3044. , SepDing, H., Ge, J., Da Costa, D., Tsiftsis, T., A novel distributed antenna selection scheme for fixed-gain amplify-and-forward relaying systems (2012) IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol., 61 (6), pp. 2836-2842. , JulKaragiannidis, G., Performance bounds of multihop wireless communications with blind relays over generalized fading channels (2006) IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., 5 (3), pp. 498-503. , MarGradshteyn, I.S., Ryzhik, I.M., (2007) Table of Integrals, Series, and Products, 7th Ed., , San Diego, CA: Academic Press