A computationally efficient multimode antenna selection algorithm for MIMO V-BLAST systems

Multimode antenna selection (MAS), the technique of jointly selecting both the number of spatial streams and antenna subsets at the transmitter, is a promising scheme for improving the performance of spatial multiplexing MIMO systems. In this paper, we investigate the problem of multimode antenna selection for the Vertical Bell Laboratories Layered Space-Time (V-BLAST) system with a goal to minimize the system´s error rate. As the error rate of a communications system varies dramatically with the transceiver architecture, the optimal MAS algorithm for V-BLAST should explicitly take the ordered-successive interference cancellation (OSIC) detection structure into account. A computationally efficient MAS algorithm is therefore proposed to exploit the recursive structure of mean-square-error matrices between consecutive OSIC detection stages and achieve near optimal error rate performance with significantly lower complexity as verified by the computer simulations.