Receive antenna selection scheme for V-BLAST with mutual coupling in correlated channels

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna systems are capable of providing very high spectral efficiency due to the use of multiple antennas at transceivers. The problem of the expensive hardware cost associated with MIMO systems can be effectively mitigated by performing antenna selection at either or both ends. However, most works on antenna selection consider uncoupled antennas only, which might not be practical when implemented in a small-sized mobile unit. In this paper, effects of mutual coupling between antenna elements are included in the system model. We evaluate the system error performance of different antenna selection schemes in correlated channels when mutual coupling effects exist. Simulation results show that when the separation between two adjacent antennas is small, antenna selection schemes can significantly improve the performance degradation caused by the highly correlated and coupled receive signals. It could even outperform the full system, which is not possible under ideal channel conditions. In particular, the performance based selection scheme has the best performance in this scenario over capacity based selection and RF pre-processing.