A near optimal performance based receive antenna selection algorithm for MMSE V-BLAST system

Multiple antennas wireless systems can achieve large capacity at the expense of high hardware cost associated with the radio frequency (RF) chains. Antenna selection schemes make use of more antennas than RF chains and select a subset of antennas. It is an effective approach to reduce the hardware cost without much capacity loss. Antenna selection schemes in layered space-time system are mostly investigated in terms of capacity, and for zero-forcing (ZF) linear receivers. In this paper we analyse and compare the performance of antenna selection for Zero-Forcing and minimum mean square error (MMSE) based V-BLAST receivers, and derived a new performance bound for MMSE receivers. A novel performance based selection criterion for MMSE V-BLAST system is proposed, and named the minmax MSE criterion. Computer simulation shows that this new criterion can obtain the diversity of a full system and outperforms other previously proposed schemes with a near-optimal performance. © 2006 IEEE.