A wide range of multimedia applications must be supported by the modern fifth generation (5G) wireless communication systems for realizing the diverse applications in smart cities. The diverse applications such as real-time monitoring of roads, smart homes, smart industries, etc., for a sustainable smart city emphasizes a robust and efficient image transmission. In this paper, the influence of maximal ratio combining (MRC) on the reception of images with different orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) versions is studied. The different OFDM versions considered here are the fast Fourier transform (FFT) based OFDM and discrete cosine transform (DCT) based OFDM. A comparison between diverse modulation levels for the images transmitted through different OFDM methodologies, along with variation in a number of receiving antennas for MRC, is proposed for additive white gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading channels. The diverse modulation levels used are binary phase shift keying (BPSK), quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK), 8-PSK, and 16-PSK. The parameters that are used to compare different versions of OFDM for MRC antenna configurations are signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) vs. bit error rate (BER) and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) at the receiver as an estimation parameter for the received image quality.