Global and Fast Receiver Antenna Selection for MIMO Systems

For a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with more antennas at the receiver than the transmitter, selecting the same number of receiver antennas as the number of transmit antennas captures most of the advantages of MIMO capacity performance and reduces the system hardware and computational cost at the same time. In this paper, a fast and global-search receive antenna selection algorithm is proposed for this MIMO array configuration. Different from many existing fast but 'local' antenna selection algorithms which obtain the sub-optimal channel submatrix by adding or removing one row per step, our algorithm acquires the near-optimal channel matrix by directly and rapidly searching the maximum-volume submatrix of the original channel matrix. Due to its 'globally searching' property, our antenna selection algorithm leads to a substantial improvement in the capacity optimality for moderate to high SNRs, and obtains almost the same capacity performance as that of the exhaustive-search-based optimal antenna selection algorithm. Furthermore, the computational load and memory requirement for our antenna selection method are still comparable to those of the existing sub-optimal antenna selection methods. Numerical results are provided to verify the validity of the proposed methods.