Downlink scheduling with fairness and optimal antenna assignment for MIMO cellular systems

A bandwidth-limited wireless channel can considerably improve its performance by exploiting multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) antennas. Combining spatial multiplexing with multiuser diversity, we develop an optimal cross-layer scheduling mechanism that executes fair scheduling at the upper layer and optimal antenna assignment at the physical layer. For fair scheduling, we propose a framework that achieves the objective of maximum capacity and proportional fairness. For optimal antenna assignment, we consider the Hungarian algorithm that maximally utilizes the characteristics of MIMO systems by adopting the graph theoretical approach. Through simulations, we demonstrate the performance of the optimal scheduling.