Adaptive antenna selection for energy-efficient MIMO-OFDM wireless systems

In this paper, we investigate energy-efficiency in antenna selection OFDM-based systems. We show that an OFDM system with conventional antenna selection approaches, including per-subcarrier selection (i.e., selecting antennas independently for each subcarrier) and bulk-selection (i.e., choosing the same antennas for all subcarriers), suffers from a significant loss in energy-efficiency. To achieve a better energy-efficiency performance, we propose an adaptive antenna selection scheme where both the number of active RF (radio frequency) chains and the antenna indices are selected depending on the channel condition. This selection scheme could be implemented by exhaustive search. Moreover, we develop an algorithm that achieves a near-optimal performance with much lower complexity when the number of antennas is large, compared to the (optimal) exhaustive search method. Simulation results demonstrate a significant improvement in terms of energy-efficiency in the proposed system compared to the conventional counterparts.