A Simplified User Identification Approach for Multi-User Diversity with Enhanced Throughput

In a wireless network, multi-user diversity can be employed to improve system throughput performance by scheduling the channel to the user with the best instantaneous channel state information (CSI). However, the overhead induced by polling CSIs of a large number of users can overshadow the multi-user diversity gain. In our previous work, a user identification approach (UIDA) was proposed to reduce the system overhead. In this paper, by allowing a small degree of outage to occur, we simplify the UIDA to reduce the overhead further, and present the throughput and outage analysis of the simplified UIDA over Rayleigh fading channels. Computer simulations based on IEEE 802.11a systems show that the simplified UIDA achieves considerable throughput improvement.