Transmit antenna selection for V-BLAST systems with ordered successive interference cancellation

There are now great interests in antenna selection strategy for spatial multiplexing systems for the reason that it can reduce cost and complexity yet retain a large part of benefits of multiple antennas. In this paper, we focus on the transmit antenna selection criterion which is applicable to V-BLAST systems with OSIC detection. Based on sub-optimal sorting and QR decomposition, an approximate performance analysis of each sub-stream for V-BLAST transmission is done, and a new solution to the transmit antenna selection problems is suggested. Unlike most of the existing works, this criterion takes into account the impacts of ordering and cancellation. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm behaves well both in outage capacity and in BER performance. Furthermore, due to the nature of QR decomposition, the implemental complexity can be reduced further by utilizing Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization.