Optimization of coded MIMO-transmission with antenna selection

The performance of a wireless system can be significantly improved by using multiple antenna elements at the transmitter and/or the receiver side. The major problems of such systems are high cost and complexity due to more than one radio frequency (RF) chains at both end links. An effective technique to reduce this overhead is to allow the transmitter and/or the receiver to select an optimum antenna subset according to some optimization criterion. In this paper, we analyze coded multiple-input/multiple output (MIMO) systems with antenna selection at the transmitter side. We propose an optimum selection criterion to minimize the bit error ratio (BER) when a channel adapted quasi-orthogonal space time code (QSTBC) and a low complexity zero forcing receiver (ZF) are used. We show that antenna selection is a promising low-cost technique that provides additional diversity and coding gain and therefore improves the system performance even if the simple linear receiver is used.