Abstract: A vertical bell laboratories layered space-time (V-BLAST) system with partial transmit antenna selection is studied. The first layers are separated from the remaining layers by an incomplete QR decomposition. Then, the corresponding antennas are selected according to a certain selection criterion and the first layers are detected. After eliminating contributions of the first layers from the received signals, the remaining layers are also detected. Compared with conventional selection methods, this selection scheme provides multiple trade-offs between complexity and performance according to . Simulation results show that the partial transmit antenna selection retains most of the symbol error ratio (SER) performance of the full selection system. For a 4 transmit RF chains with 4 receive RF chains and 6 transmit antennas, simulation results show that the partial transmit antenna selection based on the max-min criterion can save about 40% up to 92% of the selection time required for the full selection system.

Key words: antenna selection, V-BLAST, QR decomposition, antenna selection complexity