Receive antenna selection for MIMO systems in correlated channels

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems can provide great capacity improvement but suffer from multiple expensive RF chains. Antenna selection offers a good tradeoff between complexity and performance. This paper addresses the problem of optimal receive antenna selection in correlated channels. We consider the transmission of M independent signals to a base station with N correlated antennas and present two criteria for selecting the optimal L out of N receive antennas in terms of capacity maximization or BER minimization, assuming that only the long-term channel statistics, instead of the instantaneous channel state information, are known. Simulations will validate our theoretical analysis and demonstrate that within a rather wide angular spread range, the number of required RF chains can be significantly decreased using our proposed selection strategy while achieving very close performance to the instantaneous antenna selection system and the conventional MIMO system without antenna selection.