Antenna selection for spatial multiplexing systems based on minimum error rate

Future cellular systems will employ spatial multiplexing with multiple antennas at both transmitter and receiver to take advantage of large capacity gains. In such systems it will be desirable to select a subset of available transmit antennas for link initialization, link maintenance, or handoff. In this paper we present a criteria for selecting the optimal antenna subset in terms of minimum error rate, when coherent receivers, either linear or maximum likelihood (ML), are used over a slowly varying channel. For the ML receiver we propose to pick the subset whose output constellation has the largest minimum Euclidean distance. For the linear receiver we propose use of the post-processing SNRs (signal to noise ratios) of the multiplexed streams whereby the antenna subset that induces the largest minimum SNR is chosen. Simulations demonstrate that our selection algorithms also provides diversity advantage thus making subset selection useful over fading channels