Multiuser MIMO Scheduling for Mobile Video Applications

Bandwidth-demanding mobile video applications are becoming increasingly popular in wireless networks, leading to a relentless growth in the demand for wireless throughput and quality of service (QoS). Multiuser Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) has great potential to meet the growth of wireless throughput. However, this advancement in physical-layer technologies does not necessarily translate into better QoS for the applications, unless the design principles and operating protocols at the higher layers of the networking stack are adapted accordingly to fully capture this potential. We propose a new scheduling algorithm, which selects mobile users to form multiuser MIMO based on the priorities we carefully design to leverage the demands of wireless throughput and video quality. We also develop a new computationally efficient parallel technique to calculate the priorities precisely, which allows the users to be selected in a computationally effective way. Analyses and simulations show that the proposed scheme allows video applications to achieve close to the throughput upper bound of multiuser MIMO. Our scheme also improves the video quality by reducing the loss of video enhancement packets by an order of magnitude and by reducing the delay by 35%, compared to the state of the art.