Statistical Multimode Transmit Antenna Selection for Limited Feedback MIMO Systems

This paper was presented in part at the Asia-Pacific Conference on Communications, Busan, Korea, August 2006.In a wireless multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, transmit antenna selection is an effective means of achieving good performance with low complexity. We consider spatial multiplexing with linear receivers, and equal power and equal rate allocation over different selected transmit antennas in order to reduce feedback overhead. Under these constraints, we address the problem of statistical multimode transmit antenna subset selection to improve the capacity of spatially correlated MIMO fading channels. In particular, we first derive an analytical closed-form expression for the expectation of the lower bound on the capacity using the smallest eigenvalue distribution of a Wishart matrix. Then, we propose a transmit antenna subset selection criterion of maximizing this average lower-bound capacity

Spatial-Mode Selection for the Joint Transmit and Receive MMSE Design

To approach the potential MIMO capacity while optimizing the system bit error rate (BER) performance, the joint transmit and receive minimum mean squared error (MMSE) design has been proposed. It is the optimal linear scheme for spatial multiplexing MIMO systems, assuming a fixed number of spatial streams p as well as a fixed modulation and coding across these spatial streams. However, state-of-the-art designs arbitrarily choose and fix the value of the number of spatial streams p, which may lead to an inefficient power allocation strategy and a poor BER performance. We have previously proposed to relax the constraint of fixed number of streams p and to optimize this value under the constraints of fixed average total transmit power and fixed spectral efficiency, which we referred to as spatial-mode selection. Our previous selection criterion was the minimization of the system sum MMSE. In the present contribution, we introduce a new and better spatial-mode selection criterion that targets the minimization of the system BER. We also provide a detailed performance analysis, over flat-fading channels, that confirms that our proposed spatial-mode selection significantly outperforms state-of-the-art joint Tx/Rx MMSE designs for both uncoded and coded systems, thanks to its better exploitation of the MIMO spatial diversity and more efficient power allocation