Efficient Power-Aware Packet Scheduling for Multiantenna Packet Radio Systems

In this paper, we propose fairness-oriented packet scheduling (PS) schemes with power-efficient control mechanism for future packet radio systems. In general, multi-antenna transmit-receive schemes provide additional flexibility to packet scheduler functionality. Stemming from the earlier enhanced proportional fair scheduler studies for single-input multiple-output (SIMO) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, we extend the development of efficient packet scheduling algorithms by adding transmit power considerations in the overall priority metrics calculations and scheduling decisions. Furthermore, we evaluate the proposed scheduling schemes by simulating practical orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) based packet radio system in terms of throughput, coverage and fairness distribution among users. As a concrete example, under reduced overall transmit power constraint and unequal power distribution for different sub-bands, we demonstrate that by using the proposed power-aware multi-user scheduling schemes, significant coverage and fairness improvements in the order of 70% and 20% can be obtained, at the expense of average throughput loss of only 15%.