Frame Design and Throughput Evaluation for Practical Multiuser MIMO OFDMA Systems

This paper describes the design of a time-division duplexing frame with a variety of pilots for multiuser multiple-input-multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (MU-MIMO OFDMA) systems, where the base station and users are equipped with four and two transmitting and receiving antennas, respectively. In addition, a simplified scheduling algorithm for the MU-MIMO OFDMA is proposed, and its computational complexity is analyzed. The proposed scheduling algorithm shows comparable sum achievable rates to the optimal MU-MIMO OFDMA scheduling that searches for user pairs in an exhaustive manner, whereas its complexity is fairly reduced. Furthermore, to verify the performance of MU-MIMO OFDMA systems that employ the proposed frame structure and scheduling algorithm, a system-level comparison of the average cell throughputs between the proposed MU-MIMO and the conventional MIMO OFDMA systems is numerically performed in a practical cellular environment. As a result, vital information on how we can apply MU-MIMO OFDMA schemes in cellular environments is provided.