Antenna subset selection for massive MIMO systems: A trace-based sequential approach for sum rate maximization

Massive MIMO technology is a promising candidate for the next generation wireless communication systems. The basic idea is to implement a large number of antennas at the base station (BS) of a cell to serve a relatively small number of users. Such an approach brings many benefits in terms of the throughput and energy efficiency. Two major challenges associated with massive MIMO systems are high power consumption and high system complexity. These problems can effectively be dealt with by performing antenna-subset selection at the BS. In this paper, we propose low-complexity antenna-subset selection schemes for both single-cell and multiple-cell cooperative massive MIMO systems for equal-rate zero-forcing beamforming transmission at the BS. These schemes sequentially select an antenna that contributes the most to the overall system sum rate. Simulation results show that our proposed schemes outperform other schemes with similar computational complexities and even surpass some of the higher computational complexity schemes in a massive MIMO setting.