Improved Spectral Efficiency With Acceptable Service Provision in Multiuser MIMO Scenarios

In this paper, we study the downlink resource assignment problem of maximizing the total data rate subject to minimum satisfaction guarantees in multiservice scenarios assuming the use of multiuser (MU) multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) techniques. With the use of MU MIMO techniques, the same frequency resource can be shared by different terminals at the same time by assigning different spatial channels to each terminal. Different from single-user (SU) access per frequency resource where the resource assignment problem consists of searching for the best association between frequency resources and terminals, with MU access per resource, we aim at finding which space-division multiple-access (SDMA) group should be associated with each frequency resource. The first contribution of this paper is the formal presentation of this generalized problem as an optimization problem. Then, after some mathematical manipulations, we managed to convert this problem from a nonlinear integer to an integer linear problem (ILP) that can be optimally solved by standard techniques instead of resorting to brute-force methods. Motivated by the high computational complexity of the optimal solution, we propose a low-complexity algorithm. By analyzing outage rate and total data rate performance metrics, we show that the proposed solution presents a good performance-complexity tradeoff compared with the method for obtaining the optimal solution.