Opportunistic Feedback for Multiuser MIMO Systems With Linear Receivers

A novel multiuser scheduling and feedback strategy for the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) downlink is proposed in this paper. It achieves multiuser diversity gain without substantial feedback requirements. The proposed strategy uses per-antenna scheduling at the base station, which maps each transmit antenna at the base station (equivalently, a spatial channel) to a user. Each user has a number of receive antennas that is greater than or equal to the number of transmit antennas at the base station. Zero-forcing receivers are deployed by each user to decode the transmitted data streams. In this system, the base station requires users' channel quality on each spatial channel for scheduling. An opportunistic feedback protocol is proposed to reduce the feedback requirements. The proposed protocol uses a contention channel that consists of a fixed number of feedback minislots to convey channel state information. Feedback control parameters including the channel quality threshold and the random access feedback probability are jointly adjusted to maximize the average throughput performance of this system. Multiple receive antennas at the base station are used on the feedback channel to allow decoding multiple feedback messages sent simultaneously by different users. This further reduces the bandwidth of the feedback channel. Iterative search algorithms are proposed to solve the optimization for selection of these parameters under both scenarios that the cumulative distribution functions of users are known or unknown to the base station     

Distributed approaches for exploiting multiuser diversity in wireless networks

In wireless fading channels, multiuser diversity can be exploited by scheduling users to transmit when their channel conditions are favorable. This leads to a sum throughput that increases with the number of users and, in certain cases, achieves capacity. However, such scheduling requires global knowledge of every user's channel gain, which may be difficult to obtain in some situations. This paper addresses contention-based protocols for exploiting multiuser diversity with only local channel knowledge. A variation of the ALOHA protocol is given in which users attempt to exploit multiuser diversity gains, but suffer contention losses due to the distributed channel knowledge. The growth rate of the sum throughput for this protocol is characterized in a backlogged system under both short-term and long-term average power constraints. A simple "fixed-rate" system is shown to be asymptotically optimal and to achieve the same growth rate as in a system with an optimal centralized scheduler. Moreover, asymptotically, the fraction of throughput lost due to contention is shown to be 1/e. Also, in a system with random arrivals and an infinite user population, a variation of this ALOHA protocol is shown to be stable for any total arrival rate, given that users can estimate the backlog.     

MIMO Broadcast Scheduling with Limited Feedback

We consider multiuser scheduling with limited feedback of partial channel state information in MIMO broadcast channels. By using spatial multiplexing at the base station (BS) and antenna selection for each user, we propose a multiuser scheduling method that allocates independent information streams from all M transmit antennas to the M most favorable users with the highest signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). A close approximation of the achievable sum-rate throughput for the proposed method is obtained and shown to match the simulation results very well. Moreover, two reduced feedback scheduling approaches are proposed. In the first approach, which we shall refer to as selected feedback scheduling, the users are selected based on their SINR compared to a predesigned threshold. Only those selected users are allowed to feed back limited information to the BS. The resultant feedback load and achievable throughput are derived. It will then be demonstrated that with a proper choice of the threshold, the feedback load can be greatly reduced with a negligible performance loss. The second reduced feedback scheduling approach employs quantization for each user, in which only few bits of quantized SINR are fed back to the BS. Performance analysis will show that even with only 1-bit quantization, the proposed quantized feedback scheduling approach can exploit the multiuser diversity at the expense of slight decrease of throughput.     

Opportunistic Beamforming over Rayleigh Channels with Partial Side Information

In recent years, diversity techniques have evolved into highly attractive technology for wireless communications in different forms. For instance, the channel fluctuations of the users in a network are exploited as multiuser diversity by scheduling the user with the best signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). When fading is slow, beamforming at a multiple antenna transmitter is used to induce artificial channel fluctuations to ensure multiuser diversity in the network. Such a beamforming scheme is called opportunistic beamforming since the transmitter uses random beamforming to artificially induce opportunism in the network [1]. Opportunism requires a large number of users in the system in order to reach the performance of the true beamforming that uses perfect channel state information (CSI). In this paper we investigate the benefit of having partial CSI at an opportunistic transmitter. In the investigation, we focus on the maximum normalized SNR scheduling where user?s feedback consists of SNR relative to its channel gain. We show that opportunism can be beneficially used to increase the average throughput of the system. Simulations support the analytical average throughput results obtained as the amount of CSI and the number of users vary.     

The Performance of Multiuser Diversity Scheduling for MIMO Channels With Spatially Correlated Fading

We study a cellular network with one multiantenna base station and a number of multiantenna users. Correlated fading may exist at the base station or at the users, or at both sides. With time-varying fading, multiuser diversity is exploited by always allowing the base station to transmit to the user with the best channel. For this network, we find that if the number of transmitter antennas and the number of receiver antennas grow with a fixed ratio, the multiuser diversity gain will approximately remain constant.     

Antenna diversity in multiuser data networks

We consider the use of multiple antennas at the transmitter and/or the receiver to provide open-loop spatial diversity in a multiuser wireless data network. With channel quality information (CQI) available to the transmitter, and by always scheduling the transmission to the active user having the best channel conditions at the time of scheduling, another form of diversity, termed multiuser diversity, is obtained in a data system. This paper provides an analysis of the interaction between these two forms of diversity. From a network point of view, we prove that the asymptotic sum rate, in the limit of a large number of active homogeneous users and subject to the same average total transmit power, is inversely related to the number of transmit antennas for independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) flat Rayleigh fading channels. In the case of i.i.d. flat Rician fading, the asymptotic sum rate also depends inversely on the number of transmit antennas, but directly on the number of receive antennas. Numerically, we show that the total diversity gain is also constrained by finite CQI quantization and channel fading statistics.     

Scheduling with base station diversity and fairness analysis for the downlink of CDMA cellular networks

Efficient packet scheduling in CDMA cellular networks is a challenging problem due to the time variant and stochastic nature of the channel fading process. Selection diversity is one of the most effective techniques utilizing random and independent variations of diverse channels to improve the performance of communication over fading channels. In this paper, we propose two packet scheduling schemes exploiting base station selection diversity in the downlink of CDMA cellular networks. The proposed schemes rely on the limited instantaneous channel state information (CSI) to select the best user from the best serving base station at each time slot. This technique increases the system throughput by increasing multiuser diversity gain and reducing the effective interference among adjacent base stations. Results of Monte Carlo simulations are given to demonstrate the improvement of system throughput using the proposed scheduling schemes. In addition, we investigate fairness issue of wireless scheduling schemes. Due to different characteristics of wireless scheduling schemes, the existing fairness indexes may result in misleading comparison among different schemes. We propose a new fairness index to compare the overall satisfaction of the network users for different scheduling schemes. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Opportunistic Channel Quality Feedback Scheme for Proportional Fair Scheduling

In this paper, we propose a channel quality information (CQI) feedback load reduction scheme for proportional fair scheduling (PFS) in wireless systems. The proposed scheme induces select users to feed back CQI only when the probability of selection is high. It is shown that the proposed scheme achieves system throughput comparable to the conventional scheme, where each and every user feeds back its CQIs, with significant feedback load reduction for each of the users.     

多用户MIMO系统下行链路的随机多波束复用技术

该文提出了一种随机多波束多用户复用技术,充分利用多用户分集以及基站多天线的空间自由度来提高系统吞吐量。不同于传统的随机波束形成技术,该技术首先在给定预编码码本内随机选取一个码字,然后调度多个空分复用用户以及其余预编码矩阵。该文采用了一种逐次调度的方式,第一次训练调度一个主发送用户并确定一个次发送预编码矩阵,通过第二次训练选择次发送用户,这种方式能以很小的反馈开销有效控制复用用户之间的相互干扰。同时,该文所提技术能进一步推广到用户具有不同天线配置的异构情形。仿真结果表明,该文技术在具有不同相关性的信道环境下都能获得较优的系统吞吐量。     

Impacts of Radio Channel Characteristics, Heterogeneous Traffic Intensity, and Near–Far Effect on Rate Adaptive Scheduling Algorithms

Applying adaptive modulation combined with scheduling in a shared data channel can substantially improve the spectral efficiency for wireless systems. This performance gain results from the multiuser diversity, which exploited independent channel variations across multiple users. In this paper, we present a cross-layer analysis to integrate physical-layer channel characteristics, media access control (MAC) layer scheduling strategies, and the network layer issue of heterogeneous traffic intensity across near–far users. Specifically, for radio channel characteristics, we take account of path loss, slowly varying log-normal shadowing and fast-varying Nakagami fading. We also evaluate the impact of selective transmit diversity on the throughput and fairness of wireless data networks. Furthermore, we consider three MAC schedulers: random scheduler, greedy scheduler (GS), and a newly proposed queue-length-based scheduler (QS). By applying the proposed cross-layer analytical framework, the following insights can be gained. First, for the three considered schedulers, channel fluctuations induced by Nakagami fading or log-normal shadowing can improve both total throughput and fairness. Second, using selective transmit diversity can improve throughput, but is unfavorable for the fairness performance. Third, the GS and the QS methods can improve throughput at the expense of unfairness to the far users. However, the throughput improvement from using the GS and the QS decreases as the traffic intensity of the far user increases. In summary, this cross-layer analysis can be used to develop new scheduling mechanisms for achieving better tradeoff between the fairness and throughput for wireless data networks.     

Exploiting Multiuser Diversity With Imperfect One-Bit Channel State Feedback

It has been well recognized that significant throughput gains can be leveraged in multiuser wireless communication systems by exploiting multiuser diversity with a smart scheduler. This scheduler collects channel state information (CSI) from all users and allocates the resources to the user(s) experiencing favorable channel conditions. However, for a frequency-division-duplex system with a large number of users, how to efficiently collect the required CSI will be a challenging task, especially when the feedback links are of limited capacity. In this paper, we propose a scheduling algorithm to exploit multiuser diversity with possibly imperfect one-bit channel state feedback. The basic idea is to define a threshold lambda and let each user report one-bit information to the scheduler about the comparison between its measured channel fading level and lambda. Correspondingly, the scheduler uses these feedback bits to classify all users into two sets and assigns the channel to one user belonging to the set experiencing favorable channel conditions. Several implementation schemes are developed by attacking the optimization of lambda under different system configurations, covering both the case when the one-bit feedback is perfect and those when the one-bit feedback is imperfect. Computer simulations show that when the user number is large, say, more than ten users, the proposed scheduling supports significantly larger data rate over the round-robin scheduling, while in comparison with the optimum scheduling with complete CSI, the performance loss is limited if the one-bit feedback is of high reliability. In addition, our studies show that we can effectively enhance the robustness against feedback imperfectness by incorporating the feedback reliability into optimization of lambda     

多用户MIMO系统在有限反馈下结合预编码与调度算法的研究

捅要：研究了多用户多输入多输出（MIMO）系统在有限反馈下的一种结合单位预编码与用户调度算法的方案。在该系统中每一用户都具有多个接收天线,该方案具有较大的多用户分集增益和较小的计算复杂度,从而能够减少系统中的用户间干扰。每个用户独立地决定自己的天线合并矢量,并将最优波束矢量以及对应的估计信干噪比通过有限反馈信道反馈给基站,此时基站获取了相应的用户信道信息和用户间干扰信息。基于接收到的反馈信息,基站从预定义的码本中选取和速率最大的最优子集进行系统预编码,然后依照预编码矩阵调度欧氏距离最小的用户且用户个数不超过发送天线的数目。仿真结果显示该方案有效地改善了系统速率,特别是在用户数目较多或者信道环境较好的情况下。     

Opportunistic beamforming using dumb antennas

Multiuser diversity is a form of diversity inherent in a wireless network, provided by independent time-varying channels across the different users. The diversity benefit is exploited by tracking the channel fluctuations of the users and scheduling transmissions to users when their instantaneous channel quality is near the peak. The diversity gain increases with the dynamic range of the fluctuations and is thus limited in environments with little scattering and/or slow fading. In such environments, we propose the use of multiple transmit antennas to induce large and fast channel fluctuations so that multiuser diversity can still be exploited. The scheme can be interpreted as opportunistic beamforming and we show that true beamforming gains can be achieved when there are sufficient users, even though very limited channel feedback is needed. Furthermore, in a cellular system, the scheme plays an additional role of opportunistic nulling of the interference created on users of adjacent cells. We discuss the design implications of implementing. this scheme in a complete wireless system     

Low complexity MIMO scheduling with channel decomposition using capacity upperbound

In multiuser MIMO systems, the base station schedules transmissions to a group of users simultaneously. Since the data transmitted to each user are different, in order to avoid the inter-user interference, a transmit preprocessing technique which decomposes the multiuser MIMO downlink channel into multiple parallel independent single-user MIMO channels can be used. When the number of users is larger than the maximum that the system can support simultaneously, the base station selects a subset of users who have the best instantaneous channel quality to maximize the system throughput. Since the exhaustive search for the optimal user set is computationally prohibitive, a low complexity scheduling algorithm which aims to maximize the capacity upper bound is proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed scheduling algorithm achieves comparable total throughput as the optimal algorithm with much lower complexity.     

Subcarrier Wise Scheduling Methods for Multi-antenna and Multi-carrier Systems

In this paper, multiuser scheduling algorithms are evaluated for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) networks. These scheduling schemes allocate M [number of transmit antennas at base station (BS)] number of independent data streams from BS to the M most favourable users experiencing the highest signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR). Here, SINR is used to convey the channel state information (CSI) to the BS. We have investigated the system throughput and feedback overhead attained by these scheduling schemes for different scenarios as: (a) the maximum CSI is sent to the BS by every user and (b) the maximum CSI sent to the BS corresponding to every BS antenna. The overall feedback overhead incurred by MIMO-OFDM system increases linearly with number of users, number of subcarriers and number of transmit antennas. Hence, to reduce the feedback overhead, a scheme is proposed where users with SINR values greater than or equal to a predefined threshold value are only allowed to feedback the channel state information to BS. The relation between system throughput and various thresholds is also studied. The achievable system throughput results are validated by comparing the probability density function of achieved SINR values by different scheduling schemes.

     

An overview of scheduling algorithms in MIMO-based fourth-generation wireless systems

In this article an overview of the scheduling algorithms proposed for fourth-generation multiuser wireless networks based on multiple-input multiple-output technology is presented. In MIMO systems a multi-user diversity gain can be extracted by tracking the channel fluctuations between each user and the base station, and scheduling transmission for the "best" user. Based on this idea, several opportunistic scheduling schemes that attempt to improve global capacity or satisfy users with different QoS requirements have been proposed. Transmit beamforming procedures aimed at increasing the channel fluctuations have been proposed. The simultaneous exploitation of both spatial and multi-user diversity is not straightforward; however, it may be achieved by a refined selection of the "best" user. In addition, a multiple access gain can be obtained from a simple SDMA/TOMA system. Finally, several resource allocation schemes are discussed for this hybrid multiple access system.     

Enhanced multiuser random beamforming: dealing with the not so large number of users case

We consider the downlink of a wireless system with an M-antenna base station and K single-antenna users. A limited feedback-based scheduling and precoding scenario is considered that builds on the multiuser random beamforming (RBF). Such a scheme was shown to yield the same capacity scaling, in terms of multiplexing and multiuser diversity gain, as the optimal full CSIT-based (channel state information at transmitter) precoding scheme, in the large number of users K regime. Unfortunately, for more practically relevant (low to moderate) K values, RBF yields degraded performance. In this work, we investigate solutions to this problem. We introduce a two-stage framework that decouples the scheduling and beamforming problems. In our scenario, RBF is exploited to identify good, spatially separable, users in a first stage. In the second stage, the initial random beams are refined based on the available feedback to offer improved performance toward the selected users. Specifically, we propose beam power control techniques that do not change the direction of the second-stage beams, offering feedback reduction and performance tradeoffs. The common feature of these schemes is to restore robustness of RBF with respect to sparse network settings (low K), at the cost of moderate complexity increase.     

Opportunistic Scheduling in Multiuser OFDM Systems with Clustered Feedback

This paper proposes a random access based feedback protocol for multiuser orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems with clustered feedback, where users are assigned to clusters of subcarriers based on the feedback of channel state information to the base station. To reduce feedback requirements, the proposed protocol employs a contention channel with a fixed number of feedback minislots to carry feedback for each cluster. Users send a feedback message with some probability in the appropriate feedback slot if their average channel quality on a cluster is above a threshold. Both arithmetic and geometric averages are used and compared as channel quality measures. The threshold and feedback probability are jointly adjusted to maximize the estimated average sum rate of all users based on two different limited feedback information. Numerical simulations illustrate that it is possible to achieve multiuser diversity gain despite collisions in the feedback channel and with only a few feedback opportunities.     

The Effect of On-Off Scheduling to the Required Transmit Power in Systems with Fast Power Control

Physical layer channel-aware scheduling may significantly improve coverage and throughput of IP based services in wireless cellular networks, and the feasibility of such schedulers is actively studied within 3G and 4G systems. A channel-aware scheduler requires access to instantaneous channel state information in order to direct transmission to users with favorable channel conditions. In frequency division duplex (FDD) systems, this requires a fast feedback channel between mobile and base stations, and the overhead of the feedback control channel should be kept as low as possible.In this paper, we study the effect of control channel overhead to on-off scheduling (OOS) when fast transmit power control is applied in data and control channels. On-off scheduling is a simple channel-aware scheduling algorithm, where transmission to a user is suspended if the transmit power exceeds a given threshold. On-off scheduling is applied on the data channel while control channel is always on so that the scheduler is able to obtain channel state information from active users. The gain of OOS strongly depends on the power ratio between control and data channels, and increased interference due to control signaling and decreased interference due to channel-aware scheduling should be jointly considered in system design. Gains in the required transmit power are translated into gains in coverage and capacity assuming WCDMA parameters, and the results can be applied, e.g., when designing scheduling algorithms and corresponding signaling formats for WCDMA uplink.     

User Cooperation in the Absence of Phase Information at the Transmitters

In this paper, a multiuser communication system in which wireless users cooperate to transmit information to a base station is considered. The proposed scheme can significantly enlarge the achievable rate region, provided that the wireless connections between pairs of cooperating users are stronger than the connection from every user to the base station. The gains in transmission rate remain substantial even when the channel phase information is only available at the receivers, not at the transmitters. In the proposed scheme, a transmission period is divided into two time intervals. During the first time interval, wireless users send data to the base station and to the neighboring users simultaneously using a broadcast channel paradigm. During the second time interval, the users cooperate to transmit information to the base station. The achievable rate region corresponding to this paradigm is characterized under a random phase channel model for a two-user system. Results are then generalized to a multiple-user scenario. For fixed system parameters, the achievable rate region is strictly larger than that of the traditional multiple-access channel, thereby allowing a fair distribution of the wireless resources among users. Numerical analysis suggests that cooperating with a single partner is enough to achieve most of the benefits associated with cooperation.