A Practical Antenna Selection Technique in Multiuser Massive MIMO Networks

In this paper, a practical antenna selection (AS) scheme is investigated for downlink multiuser massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) networks where a base station (BS) is equipped with many antennas (N) and communicates with K mobile stations (MSs) simultaneously. In the proposed antenna selection technique, S antennas (S ≤ N) are selected for transmission based on the knowledge of channel coefficients of each MS for reducing the number of RF chains which mainly induce cost increase in terms of size, hardware, and power. In the proposed AS technique, a BS first ranks antenna elements according to the sum of their channel gains to all MSs. Then, the BS computes the downlink sum-rate with S consecutive antenna elements in the ordered set, where the subset consisting of S consecutive antennas is called a window. The BS selects the window resulting in the highest sum-rate. The selected S antenna elements are used for transmitting signals to multiple users, while the remaining (N − S ) antenna elements are turned off for the time slot. Therefore, the proposed AS technique requires only (N − S + 1) sum-rate computations, while the optimal AS technique involves ( N S ) computations. We analyze downlink sum-rate with the proposed AS technique and compare it with that of a reference system with the same number of antenna elements without AS. Our results show that the proposed AS technique significantly outperforms the reference scheme. key words: massive MIMO, multiuser MIMO, cellular network, antenna selection, precoding