Antenna Selection and Downlink Beamforming for Multi User – MIMO Wireless Systems

Antenna selection combined with downlink beamforming is applied to a multi user MIMO system. Using antenna selection we use only a subset of the available antennas for each user to reduce system complexity and cost and this can be done under either capacity or SNR maximization. But in a multi user scenario, the interference caused by other users – Co Channel interference – (CCI) should be considered. We will propose a reliable scheme which has shown a good performance in terms of Symbol Error Rate (SER) and capacity in which SNR maximization is our criterion for antenna selection for each user and then SINR maximization is the objective for beamformer. Several multi/single user selection schemes with different complexity are discussed, but in conclusion we propose to use the simple NBS method due to the simulation results and other considerations. The reduced channel may be used for beamforming so a smaller feedback bandwidth is needed and by assigning selection operation to users there will no need for extra process and scheduling algorithms for antenna selection at the base station

Keywords:

Antenna selection , beamforming MIMO