Dual-mode SM/STBC system with antenna subset selection employing ML detection

Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna system is a promising candidate to meet the demands of 4th Generation (4G) cellular communication systems by offering increased spectral efficiency through the spatial multiplexing (SM) gain, and improved link reliability through the space–time block coding (STBC) diversity gain. This paper presents a new scheme that combines the dual-mode SM/STBC and the antenna subset selection (AnSS) schemes. In the proposed scheme, the combination of the SM/STBC switching and the full antenna subset selection (AnSS) at both the transmitter (Tx) and the receiver (Rx) ends of the communication channel are adaptively selected through a simple algorithm based on the singular values of the channel matrix at the Rx side. Thus, the new scheme achieves the best BER performance over the previous works regardless of the data rate. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme with the full AnSS outperforms the previous works, by up to the 12.5 dB at the bit error rate (BER) of 10‐510‐5. Further, a partial AnSS is also proposed which dramatically reduces both the computational complexity (by 31%) and the hardware (by 50%), cost, without any appreciable loss in the BER performance, when compared with the full AnSS.