Multi-Switch for Antenna Selection in Massive MIMO

Massive MIMO has been shown to greatly improve spectral and transmit-energy efficiency. When implementing a massive MIMO system, one challenge is high hardware complexity. A solution is to reduce the number of radio frequency (RF) transceiver chains by performing antenna selection. However, a full RF switch that connects the antennas and RF chains can be highly complex and incurs significant loss in output signal quality, especially when the number of antennas and RF chains are large. We therefore propose a simpler solution - binary switching architecture, which is sub-optimal but provides better signal quality, as compared to the full switching network. To evaluate the proposed technique, we compare the sum-rate capacity when using several different configurations of binary switching with the performance of the full switching. Full MIMO performance obtained without antenna selection is also presented as a reference. The investigations in this paper are all
based on measured channel data at 2.6 GHz, using a uniform linear array and a cylindrical array, both having 128 antenna elements. It is found that the proposed binary switching gives very competitive performance that are close to the full switching, for the measured channels. The results indicate a potential to simplify massive MIMO hardware by reducing the number of RF chains, and performing antenna selection with simple binary switching architecture.