  The downlink of a single cell base station (BS) equipped with large-scale
multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system is investigated in this paper. As
the number of antennas at the base station becomes large, the power consumed at
the RF chains cannot be anymore neglected. So, a circuit power consumption
model is introduced in this work. It involves that the maximal sum-rate is not
obtained when activating all the available RF chains. Hence, the aim of this
work is to find the optimal number of activated RF chains that maximizes the
sum-rate. Computing the optimal number of activated RF chains must be
accompanied by an adequate antenna selection strategy. First, we derive
analytically the optimal number of RF chains to be activated so that the
average sum-rate is maximized under received equal power. Then, we propose an
efficient greedy algorithm to select the sub-optimal set of RF chains to be
activated with regards to the system sum-rate. It allows finding the balance
between the power consumed at the RF chains and the transmitted power. The
performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with the optimal performance
given by brute force search (BFS) antenna selection. Simulations allow to
compare the performance given by greedy, optimal and random antenna selection
algorithms.
