Joint User and Transmit Antenna Selection in Uplink SA-MIMO Systems

Smart antenna (SA) systems result in higher capacity and broader coverage in wireless communications. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems have resulted in higher capacity and reliability. The combination of these two systems (SA-MIMO) has advantages of both systems simultaneously. One drawback of multiple antenna systems is the high computational burden and hardware cost due to radio frequency (RF) chains. One remedy for this drawback and to reduce the number of RF chains is antenna selection in which the best subset of antennas is selected among the available large number of antennas. This paper proposes a joint user and transmit antenna selection strategy in the uplink SA-MIMO systems. First, the best subset of antennas is selected at each user on the transmit side. After that, the best user is selected to transmit the signal to the receiver. The simulation results show that how the proposed strategy results in a better performance without a need to increase the number of RF chains.