Transmit Antenna Selected V-BLAST Systems With Power Allocation

This paper considers intelligent transmit antenna selection (TAS) combined with power allocation (PA) for closed-loop multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communications. We present two novel TAS techniques for Vertical Bell Laboratories Layered Space-Time (V-BLAST) systems combined with PA that improve the uncoded error rate performance over flat-fading channels. Furthermore, we extend these techniques to V-BLAST with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (V-BLAST-OFDM) over frequency-selective channels and present TAS techniques combined with space-frequency PA. Computer simulation results demonstrate significant performance gains for these schemes, which can also be achieved with limited rate feedback, even in the presence of channel estimation errors. These techniques seem attractive for cellular reverse link systems, since due to TAS, they can improve performance by using only a small number of transmit radio frequency (RF) chains in the user terminals.