Fast Antenna Subset Selection Algorithm for MIMO Wireless Systems

Multiple-antenna wireless communication systems have recently attracted significant attention due to their higher capacity and better immunity to fading as compared to systems that employ single-sensor transceiver. Increasing the number of transmit and receive antennas enables to improve system performance but at the price of higher hardware cost and computational burden due to the multiple RF chains. Antenna selection is a low-cost low-complexity alternative to capture many of the advantages of MIMO systems. In this paper, we propose a new antenna selection algorithm with low complexity for wireless multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The new algorithm is based on the analysis of the channel capacity. It achieves almost the same outage capacity as the optimal selection method while keeping lower computational complexity. The simulation results for quasi-static Rayleigh flat fading channel demonstrate the significant performance of the proposed selection algorithm