Performance based receive antenna selection for V-BLAST systems

Multiple antennas wireless systems can achieve large capacity at the expense of high hardware cost associated with the radio frequency chains. Antenna selection schemes make use of more antennas than RF chains and select a subset of antennas to effectively reduce the hardware cost and power consumption without much capacity loss. In this paper, the problem of receive antenna selection in V-BLAST systems is investigated. Two performance based selection criteria are proposed, namely the min-max MSE and min-first stage MSE criteria. The min-max criterion achieves the best performance at the expense of high computational complexity. Complexity reduced algorithms for this selection scheme are discussed. Analytical proof is provided to show the suboptimality of the capacity based selection to the performance based selection. The hybrid scheme, which combines the performance and capacity based selection approaches is proposed, it provides a good trade-off between performance and complexity. Computer simulations demonstrate that the complexity reduction algorithms and the hybrid scheme perform better and also with a lower complexity than the capacity based selection algorithm under most system configurations. Finally, robustness of the min-max MSE criterion under channel estimation errors is evaluated via computer simulations.