Energy efficiency of massive MIMO wireless communication systems with antenna selection

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) requires a large number (tens or hundreds) of base station antennas serving for much smaller number of terminals, with large gains in energy efficiency and spectral efficiency compared with traditional MIMO technology. Large scale antennas mean large scale radio frequency (RF) chains. Considering the plenty of power consumption and high cost of RF chains, antenna selection is necessary for Massive MIMO wireless communication systems in both transmitting end and receiving end. An energy efficient antenna selection algorithm based on convex optimization was proposed for Massive MIMO wireless communication systems. On the condition that the channel capacity of the cell is larger than a certain threshold, the number of transmit antenna, the subset of transmit antenna and servable mobile terminals (MTs) were jointly optimized to maximize energy efficiency. The joint optimization problem was proved in detail. The proposed algorithm is verified by analysis and numerical simulations. Good performance gain of energy efficiency is obtained comparing with no antenna selection.