A Novel Fast Antenna Selection Algorithm in Massive MIMO Systems

In recent years, Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MMIMO) systems have emerged as a promising enabling technology to address the ever-growing demand of data traffic in the next generation of wireless networks. These systems received a great deal of interest due to their promise of high performance gains. These gains are mainly achieved at the expense of having a tremendous number of antenna elements within a relatively small physical platform. The growth in the number of antennas, however, significantly increases the Radio Frequency (RF) expenses. Therefore, developing solutions to alleviate this problem has become a major topic of interest. In this paper a stepwise regression approach is proposed to find an effective subset of transmit antennas. In each step of our scheme, we choose the antenna that maximizes the achievable rate and discard the antenna that has been selected in the previous step.  Our numerical results show that the proposed antenna selection scheme outperforms the other schemes in the literature.