Opportunistic user scheduling with normalized CQI in heterogeneous channel environments

In this paper, we consider opportunistic user scheduling in heterogeneous channel environments where users experience different channel characteristics in average. For the user scheduling with fairness, we consider the use of instantaneous channel quality information (CQI) normalized in terms of its average and variance. The proposed scheme allows users to report their normalized CQI for service request only when it is higher than a threshold, exploiting multi-user diversity gain while reducing the signaling overhead for the reporting of CQI and/or the processing complexity for the user scheduling. Simulation results show that the proposed scheduling scheme can provide scheduling fairness similar to random user scheduling while achieving multi-user diversity gain.