Combined Proportional Fair and Maximum Rate Scheduling for Virtual MIMO

Installing multiple antennas at user equipments (UEs) may pose great challenges. In virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) concept, multiple single-antenna UEs can be grouped to transmit signals at the same time. Their signals can be separated at the base station (BS) by the same methods already used in conventional point-to-point MIMO scenarios. An important problem in virtual MIMO application is which users can be scheduled simultaneously to achieve a good balance between various system targets, e.g. aggregate throughput and user fairness. In this paper, a novel scheduling scheme is proposed which combines the advantages of proportional fair and maximum rate rules, based on successive interference cancellation (SIC) MIMO receiver architecture. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve a good tradeoff between system throughput and user fairness. Compared with other scheduling schemes already proposed in virtual MIMO context, e.g., orthogonality pairing scheduling (OPS), the proposed scheme can be justified by its low computational complexity and flexibility.