Combined opportunistic beamforming and receive antenna selection [cellular downlink applications]

Opportunistic beamforming with proportional fair scheduling is a very promising technique that exploits multiuser diversity to achieve high data rates on the downlink while ensuring a certain level of fairness. However, it greatly improves system performance only for a sufficiently large mobile user population. This paper proposes a technique enhancing opportunistic beamforming at the transmitter with antenna selection at each mobile receiver to overcome this limitation. Significant performance improvement is achieved, especially for small number of users. The simplicity and inexpensive deployment of this technique make it a highly desirable enhancement to opportunistic beamforming.