Antenna Selection Symbol-Level Precoding for Low Complexity Large-Scale Antenna Array Systems

Large-Scale Antenna Array Systems may be used to serve multiple users in the same time-frequency resource block which results to harmful multi-user interference (MUI). In the literature precoding techniques have been proposed as a way to mitigate the induced MUI, by designing the transmitted signals using the knowledge of the Channel State Information (CSI), in block-level precoding (BLP) or both the CSI and the information-bearing symbols, in symbol-level precoding (SLP). However, the proposed SLP techniques require fully digital baseband processing which is infeasible in large-scale antenna array systems because of the high cost and power consumption of radio frequency (RF) components. In order to reduce the number of RF chains, we address an Antenna Selection Symbol-Level Precoding (AS-SLP) scheme, which minimizes the MUI by activating only a subset of the available antennas. For this scheme we develop an efficient algorithm, based on Coordinate Descent. Simulations provide an insight on the efficiency of the proposed approach and its improvement with respect to the fully digitally approaches.