Improving protocol performance in BLAST-based wireless systems using channel adaptive antenna selection

In this paper we investigate the performance of data-link and transport protocols running on a transmission system including multiple transmit and receive antennas with a BLAST architecture. More specifically, by exploring the possibility of adaptively selecting the set of transmit antennas to improve protocol performance, we propose and discuss a novel strategy for antenna selection which is suited to the protocols considered. We show that the use of these adaptive techniques leads to an increase of the link throughput, which becomes significant even at small values of the signal-to-noise ratio if the proposed strategy is adopted. Moreover, when applied to TCP, our selection method significantly outperforms the more general channel-capacity-based selection rules.