Antenna selection for spatial multiplexing systems with linear receivers

Future cellular systems will employ spatial multiplexing with multiple ante nnas at both transmitter and receiver to take advantage of large capacity g ains. 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 prop ose use of the post-processing SNR's (signal to noise ratios) of the multip lexed streams whereby the antenna subset that induces the largest minimum S NR is chosen. Simulations demonstrate that our selection algorithm also pro vides diversity advantage thus making linear receivers useful over fading c hannels.