Transmit Antenna Selection in a Massive MIMO System Using Convex Optimization

Massive MIMO systems, where the base station are equipped with a large number of antennas and simultaneously serving multiple single-antenna users, can offer more system capacities than conventional MIMO. Due to system complexity and hardware cost, it is necessary to select transmit antennas in order to reduce the number of RF chains. Convex optimization is used to select the antenna subset in order to maximize total receive power of all users, then the precoding method based on maximal signal-to-leakage-plus-noise-ratio(SLNR) is used to with selected antennas. The simulation results shows the proposed method of antenna selection can significantly improve the system BER performance, and is very feasible in practice.