Massive MIMO systems promise high data rates by employing large number of
antennas, which also increases the power usage of the system as a consequence.
This creates an optimization problem which specifies how many antennas the
system should employ in order to operate with maximal energy efficiency. Our
main goal is to consider a base station with a fixed number of antennas, such
that the system can operate with a smaller subset of antennas according to the
number of active user terminals, which may vary over time. Thus, in this paper
we propose an antenna selection algorithm which selects the best antennas
according to the better channel conditions with respect to the users, aiming at
improving the overall energy efficiency. Then, due to the complexity of the
mathematical formulation, a tight approximation for the consumed power is
presented, using the Wishart theorem, and it is used to find a deterministic
formulation for the energy efficiency. Simulation results show that the
approximation is quite tight and that there is significant improvement in terms
of energy efficiency when antenna selection is employed.Comment: To appear in Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications
Technologies, 12 pages, 8 figures, 2 table
