A rapid antenna selection for MIMO-diversity systems

The technology of antenna selection for MIMO diversity systems can keep most of the diversity gain, yet needs no more RF chains. This paper develops a rapid antenna selection method for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) diversity systems which use Maximum Ratio Transmit (MRT) at the transmitter and Maximum Ratio Combine (MRC) at the receiver. In this method, at each step, a new antenna is added to the selected antenna subset to make sure that they can provide the largest SNR gain. Comparing to the optimum antenna selection, this method reduces the number of antenna subsets to be searched and the computation for each step, and thus, reduces the complexity. Computer simulations show that the BER, capacity and SNR gain performances of our algorithm are nearly the same as the optimum one which needs a full search of all the possible antenna subsets.