A Simple Receive Antenna Selection Algorithm for Maximizing Channel Capacity

Despite of performance improvement of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, the complexity and hardware cost is increased due to the using of multiple RF chains. Antenna subset selection is an alternative to mitigate the problem. Through selecting the best antenna subset, reduced number of RF chains can be deployed with small performance loss. In this paper, we propose a simple antenna selection algorithm at the receiver. The algorithm is based on the subspace spanned by the row vectors of channel matrix. It achieves almost the same outage capacity as optimal selection method while keeping lower computational complexity. Through simulation results for quasi- static Rayleigh flat fading channel, we show the significant performance improvement of the proposed algorithm.