Robustness of Receive Antenna Subarray Formation to Hardware and Signal Non-Idealities

Antenna subarray formation is a novel RF preprocessing technique that reduces hardware complexity of MIMO systems while offering increased data rates with respect to conventional antenna selection schemes. With this method, each RF chain is not allocated to a single element but instead to the combined and weighted output of a subarray of elements. In this paper we study the impacts of hardware and signal processing nonidealities on the capacity performance of the proposed technique when it is applied to the receiver only. We show that it is robust to quantization, phase and calibration errors and also to channel estimation errors. Thus, it is proven that the suggested scheme could succeed in practice.