Cross-layer design for scheduling and antenna sharing in MIMO networks

This paper formulates the scheduling problem in MIMO networks as a generalized assignment problem (GAP), and advances a new cross-layer design for the scheduling of users and the assignment of their corresponding data to the available transmit antennas. The proposed scheduling and antenna sharing method, referred to as fast transmit antenna selection (FTAS), uses adaptive proportional fairness (APF) mapping as a means to determine the user-antenna assignment that maximizes the network performance both in terms of throughput and fairness. The proposed scheduler is applied in a high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) network, taking advantage of an inherent HSDPA characteristic, namely, the use of adaptive modulation and coding, while coping with the imposed maximum number of simultaneously supported codes and the absence of fast power control. Numerical results show that our scheduler provides up to 70% increase in total throughput compared to other scheduling schemes applied to HSDPA