A simple and efficient antenna subset selection scheme for MIMO systems

The use of multiple antennas at both ends of a wireless link has been shown to provide significant improvements in terms of outage capacity and average probability of error as compared to systems that employ a single sensor transceiver. However, this improvement in system performance comes at the price of increased hardware cost and computational complexity. Transmitting and receiving over a subset of the available antennas, referred to as antenna selection, offers a solution by reducing the complexity of the system and cutting down on cost while still harnessing the advantages of a wireless multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient antenna selection algorithm based on the computation of a metric which depends on the correlation between antennas. We show analytically that our algorithm achieves almost the same outage capacity and bit error rate as the optimal selection technique while having lower computational complexity. We also validate our results through extensive simulations.