Antenna grouping techniques for MIMO beamforming systems

In this paper, we investigate antenna grouping algorithms which are hybrids of beamforming and spatial multiplexing. With antenna grouping, we can achieve diversity gain through beamforming, and high spectral efficiency through spatial multiplexing. We introduce existing criteria and present several new criteria in multiple-input multiple-output antenna grouping system where the number of transmit antennas is larger than that of receive antennas. We also propose a low complexity antenna grouping algorithm. Comparing bit error rate (BER) and complexity, we demonstrate the benefits of our algorithm. We also derive the BER approximation of our algorithm.