Receive Antenna Subarray Formation for MIMO Systems in Correlated Channels

Antenna subarray formation is a novel RF pre-processing technique that alleviates the performance degradations of conventional antenna selection schemes. With this method, each RF chain is not allocated to a single antenna element, but instead to a combined and complex-weighted response of a subarray of antenna elements. In this paper, we introduce a simple, novel, analytical, suboptimal algorithm for receive antenna subarray formation that is based only on the long-term channel statistics and aims at maximizing the capacity of the resulted system by exploiting spatial correlation. As extensive computer simulations demonstrate, the proposed scheme is an advantageous RF pre-processing technique that manages to reduce the number of necessary RF chains without updating the subarray formation process for each channel instance.