Implementation of MU-MIMO schedulers on SoC

To avail the benefits of a multi-antenna system, multi-user (MU) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems multiplex different user data streams spatially over time- frequency resources. However, serving dozens of users with spatial multiplexing increases the scheduler complexity significantly. In this work, we demonstrate the computational requirements of different state-of-the-art MU-MIMO scheduling algorithms and evaluate the number of users that can be supported in real-time. To provide a fair comparison, we initially analyze the achievable sum rate of various scheduling algorithms using MATLAB for different MIMO configurations. We also propose a modification to the existing scheduling algorithm to improve the sum rate. We then implement the scheduling algorithms on Xilinx ZYNQ- ZC702 System-on-Chip (SoC) to illustrate the advantages.