Antenna selection for spatial multiplexing systems with linear receivers

Future cellular systems will employ spatial multiplexing with multiple antennas at both transmitter and receiver to take advantage of large capacity gains. In such systems it will be desirable to select a subset of available transmit antennas for link initialization, maintenance or handoff. In this letter we present a criterion for selecting the optimal antenna subset when linear, coherent receivers are used over a slowly varying channel. We propose use of the post-processing SNR's (signal to noise ratios) of the multiplexed streams whereby the antenna subset that induces the largest minimum SNR is chosen. Simulations demonstrate that our selection algorithm also provides diversity advantage thus making linear receivers useful over fading channels.