A Novel Antenna Allocation in V-BLAST System with Hybrid ARQ

In this paper, an efficient algorithm of finding an antenna switching function is proposed for an antenna-switching scheme in vertical Bell Labs layered space-time (V-BLAST) with hybrid automatic repeat request (H-ARQ). The transmit antenna is switched for each retransmission, where the switching pattern is obtained by the criterion of maximizing the channel capacity. The size of search space in the algorithm is not dependent on the maximum number of transmission but only on the number of transmit antennas. From simulation results, the obtained antenna switching function is dependent on channel correlation characteristics. In addition, the SNR values give little impact on the antenna switching function. Simulation results demonstrate that the average throughput can be further improved by the antenna switching function in a correlated fading channel, without adding much complexity to the process.