Opportunistic round robin scheduling for V-BLAST systems over multiuser MIMO channels

In this paper, we study opportunistic round robin (ORR) uplink scheduling for vertical Bell Labs layered space-time architecture (V-BLAST) systems over multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels. The proposed ORR scheduling method is compared to greedy scheduling. In greedy scheduling, the base station selects the best user based on a certain criterion without any consideration for fairness. On the other hand, ORR scheduling guarantees full fairness and each user will be served by excluding the previous selected users from the competition in the next round. The selected user spatially multiplexes his data over the transmit antennas. This spatial multiplexing (SM) scheme provides high data rates, while multiuser diversity obtained from scheduling improves the performance of the uplink system. The results show the performance and capacity gains obtained by scheduling. The greedy scheduler captures full multiuser diversity. In contrast, the ORR scheduler provides substantial signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gains compared to round robin while guaranteeing full fairness to all users.