On the performance of massive multiuser MIMO with different transmit beamforming techniques and antenna selection

In this paper, the performance of massive multiuser multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) transmit beamforming techniques and antenna selection is analyzed. Transmit antenna selection is used to reduce the number of radio frequency units, system complexity and system cost, making massive MIMO more applicable. Special attention is given to study the effect of the number of available antennae and radio frequency units on the performance of the system. Three types of transmit beamforming techniques are considered, namely, maximum ratio transmission beamforming, zero forcing beamforming, and minimum mean square error beamforming. The numerical results of the paper clearly show that transmit antenna selection affects the performance of massive MIMO systems for all considered types of transmit beamforming. In particular, it is shown that lower bit error rate can be achieved with small number of selected antennae from a large group of actual transmit antennae. This is of course in addition to the great advantage from the system complexity perspectives.