Capacity and BER improvement through antenna selection in MIMO systems

MIMO systems employ multiple transmit and receive antenna elements, substantially improve the data rates that can be transmitted over the channel and the reliability with which they can be received without any additional bandwidth. Higher data rates are achieved by transmitting multiple data streams simultaneously using spatial multiplexing techniques. Antenna selection is a solution that addresses some of the complexity drawbacks associated with MIMO systems. It reduces the hardware complexity of transmitters and receivers by using fewer RF chains than the number of antenna elements. In antenna selection, a subset of the available antenna elements is adaptively chosen by a switch, and only signals from the chosen subset are processed further by the available RF chains. Antenna selection performance has been explored from various angles such as capacity and outage for spatial multiplexing systems, and diversity order and array gain for space time coded systems.