Cross-entropy optimisation of multiple-input multiple-output capacity by transmit antenna selection

Radio channel capacity can be increased dramatically using a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) scheme, but at the expense of hardware complexity. An efficient approach for complexity reduction is antenna subset selection at the transmitter and/or receiver. A novel transmit antenna selection algorithm is presented using the cross-entropy optimisation method to maximise channel capacity. In contrast with the existing work, the proposed algorithm guarantees a result to within 99 of the true optimum (i.e. the maximal capacity with selected transmit antennas) with substantially low complexity. The simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm is independent of the relationship between the selected transmit array size and receive array size. The proposed scheme has the potential to make practical MIMO systems with high performance simpler to implement. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2007