On the multiuser diversity in SIMO interfering multiple access channels: Distributed user scheduling framework

Due to the difficulty of coordination in the cellular uplink, it is a practical challenge how to achieve the optimal throughput scaling with distributed scheduling. In this paper, we propose a distributed and opportunistic user scheduling (DOUS) that achieves the optimal throughput scaling in a single-input multiple-output interfering multiple-access channel, i.e., a multi-cell uplink network, with M antennas at each base station (BS) and N users in a cell. In a distributed fashion, each BS adopts M random receive beamforming vectors and then selects M users such that both sufficiently large desired signal power and sufficiently small generating interference are guaranteed. As a main result, it is proved that full multiuser diversity gain can be achieved in each cell when a sufficiently large number of users exist. Numerical evaluation confirms that in a practical setting of the multi-cell network, the proposed DOUS outperforms the existing distributed user scheduling algorithms in terms of sum-rate.