MIMO Receiver with Antenna Subset Selection: Algorithm and Hardware Implementation

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with antenna selection are practical in that they can alleviate the computational complexity at the receiver and achieve good reception performance. Channel correlation, not just carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR), has a great impact on reception performance in MIMO channels. We propose a practical receive antenna subset selection algorithm with reduced complexity that uses the condition number of the partial channel matrix and a predetermined CNR threshold. This paper describes the algorithm and its performance evaluation by both computer simulation and indoor experiments using a prototype receiver and received signals obtained in an actual mobile outdoor experiment. The results confirm that our proposed method provides good bit error rate performance by setting the CNR threshold properly.