Dynamic scheduling in antenna array packet radio

Efficient exploitation of the spatial diversity is fundamentally important to resource critical wireless applications. In this paper, a scheduling protocol for space-division multiple-access (SDMA) wireless packet networks is proposed. The new protocol is "channel-aware" in the sense that it performs scheduling based on terminal spatial characteristics to achieve throughput multiplication and reduction of packet delays. Performance of the system is evaluated and compared to the throughput zipper and lower bounds derived in the paper. Our analytic results show that with scheduling the throughput of the 2-antenna SDMA approaches its upper bound for a large terminal population.