Selective Interference Rejection based Antenna Selection for MIMO over LTE Advanced Networks

An important goal for long term evolution advanced (LTE-A) network is to enhance the cell edge user throughput while achieving the link reliability and high data rate communication. However, the cell edge users’ throughput is limited by inter-cell interference. To suppress the interference signal, interference rejection combining (IRC) receiver is an effective solution for Release 10/11. In Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) technique, the IRC receiver utilizes multiple antennas, larger the number of antennas, the more interfering signals can be suppressed. Due to practical constraints of increase in radio-frequency units impose a limit in the number of antennas. In this paper, a new selective interference rejection based antenna selection (SIR-AS) scheme is proposed to perform the better selection of transmitting antenna for cell edge MIMO user and enhance the system throughput. The selective interference rejection is performed by incorporating the IRC receiver, where the covariance matrix (CM) of the received interference signals is estimated and the minimum of CM is selected. The corresponding antenna set with minimum of CM is selected for transmission. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively detect intercellular interference at cell boundaries and select the optimal antenna to reduce block error rate (BLER) and improve throughput performance compared to ideal IRC and maximum ratio combining algorithm, making it suitable for LTE-A downlink receiver in multi-cell MIMO systems.