Novel transmit antenna selection strategy for massive MIMO downlink channel

In this paper, we deal with the problem of acquiring the channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter in large-scale multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems, so-called massive MIMO systems. Clearly, obtaining CSI plays a central role to provide high system performance. Even though, in frequency-division duplexed systems, acquiring this information requires a prohibitive amount of feedback, since it increases with the number of transmit antenna. In this work, we design an efficient transmit antenna selection strategy aware of the amount of required CSI for a point-to-multipoint transmission in massive MIMO systems. The proposed strategy provides high sum-rate with limited CSI feedback and limited computational complexity. Innovatively, the antenna selection in our strategy is performed in a decentralized fashion successively at the receiving users. Two schemes are proposed in this work to perform the antenna selection at each user. Next, taking into consideration that the large-scale MIMO transmitter suffers from imperfect knowledge of CSI, we design a new performance criterion. Computer simulations validate that, when the CSI is perfectly known, the proposed strategy is able to achieve high performance in terms of system sum-rate while a significant reduction in both CSI feedback overhead and computational complexity is observed. Moreover, assuming imperfect CSI, the new proposed criterion achieves higher performance when the estimation accuracy is low and at high SNR regime.