CitationMakki This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Abstract-We study the performance of antenna selectionbased multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) networks with large but finite number of transmit antennas and receivers. Considering the continuous and bursty communication scenarios with different users' data request probabilities, we develop an efficient antenna selection scheme using genetic algorithms (GA). As demonstrated, the proposed algorithm is generic in the sense that it can be used in the cases with different objective functions, precoding methods, levels of available channel state information and channel models. Our results show that the proposed GAbased algorithm reaches (almost) the same throughput as the exhaustive search-based optimal approach, with substantially less implementation complexity.