Effect of User Antenna Selection on Block Beamforming Algorithms for Suppressing Inter-User Interference in Multiuser MIMO System

Multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) improves the system channel capacity by generating a large virtual MIMO channel between a base station and multiple user terminals (UTs) with effective utilization of wireless resources. Block beamforming algorithms such as Block Diagonalization (BD) and Block Maximum Signal-to-Noise ratio (BMSN) have been proposed in order to realize MU-MIMO broadcast transmission. The BD algorithm cancels inter-user interference (IUI) by creating the weights so that the channel matrices for the other users are set to be zero matrices. The BMSN algorithm has a function of maintaining a high gain response for each desired user in addition to IUI cancellation. Therefore, the BMSN algorithm generally outperforms the BD algorithm. However, when the number of transmit antennas is equal to the total number of receive antennas, the transmission rate by both BD and BMSN algorithms is decreased. This is because the eigenvalues of channel matrices are too small to support data transmission. To resolve the issue, this paper focuses on an antenna selection (AS) method at the UTs. The AS method reduces the number of pattern nulls for the other users except an intended user in the BD and BMSN algorithms. It is verified via bit error rate (BER) evaluation that the AS method is effective in the BD and BMSN algorithms, especially, when the number of user antennas with a low bit rate (i.e., low signal-to-noise power ratio) is increased. Moreover, this paper evaluates the achievable bit rate and throughput including an actual channel state information feedback based on IEEE802.11ac standard. Although the number of equivalent receive antenna is reduced to only one by the AS method when the number of antennas at the UT is two, it is shown that the throughputs by BD and BMSN with the AS method (BD-AS and BMSN-AS) are higher than those by the conventional BD and BMSN algorithms.