A water-filling algorithm for receive antenna selection based on mutual information maximization

Despite high spectral efficiencies of multiple-input multiple-output systems, they suffer from high cost and complexity due to the use of multiple radio frequency chains. A possible solution is to select a subset of the available antennas at transmitter and/or receiver based on a criterion such as capacity maximization or error-rate minimization. In this paper, we propose a receive antenna selection algorithm to maximize instantaneous mutual information. The algorithm is based on singular value decomposition and iterative water-filling. Although sub-optimal, our algorithm performs close to optimal selection based on exhaustive search.