User Selection Criteria for Uplink Spatial Multiplexing MIMO Systems

We study in this paper multiuser uplink scheduling algorithms for Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems, where the multiusers compete for the MIMO Channel and the scheduler selects one user at a time based on a certain criterion. Then the selected user spatially multiplexes his data over the transmit antennas. This spatial multiplexing (SM) scheme provides high data rates while the multiuser diversity obtained from scheduling improves the performance of the uplink system. At the receiver, the Vertical-Bell-Labs LAyered Space Time architecture (V-BLAST) is used to detect the information layers. The main contribution of this paper is proposing and comparing the performance of several scheduling criteria for MIMO uplink scheduling. In addition, novel V-BLAST capacity bounds based on random matrix theory is presented. Furthermore, we investigate suboptimal schedulers and compare their performance. The main results of this study show that the scheduler that maximizes the optimal MIMO capacity doesn’t work well for a V-BLAST system. Instead, the optimal scheduler that maximizes the V-BLAST capacity is derived and analyzed. In addition, we look into scheduling for SM with sphere decoding and we find that in this case, using MIMO capacity as the scheduling criterion performs the best.