Practical Antenna Selection for Spatial Multiplexing MIMO Systems with Decoding Ordering

A critical factor in the deployment of spatial multiplexing multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems is the cost of multiple analog transmit/receive chains at the mobile terminal side. To mitigate this problem, antenna subset selection at the transmitter/receive has been proposed. With antenna selection, a small number of analog chains are multiplexed between a larger number of transmit/receive antenna elements. In this paper, we derive simple and robust criteria to antenna selection for V-BLAST error rate performance maximization. Both cases, where channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter is available and unavailable, are studied. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm provides a very close performance to the optimum exhaustive search performance.