A Survey on Antenna Selection for MIMO Communication Systems

This paper serves as a tutorial on antenna selection for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems. We consider the impact of antenna selection on the system capacity, as well as on the performance of the space-time trellis codes (STTCs) and space-time block codes (STBCs). We consider various fading channel models, including fast, block and slow fading. We also consider two selection criteria, namely, the one that maximizes the channel capacity and the one that maximizes the instantaneous received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We show that little capacity loss is incurred with antenna selection. We also demonstrate that the diversity order is maintained with antenna selection for STTCs only for special cases, whereas the diversity order is maintained with antenna selection for orthogonal STBCs for all channel models. This makes OSTBCs very attractive when antenna selection is considered. We finally consider the effect of some system nonidealities on the performance with antenna selection