On the Performance of a Two-User MIMO Downlink System in Heavy Traffic

A multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) downlink system in which data is transmitted to two users over a common wireless channel is considered. The channel is assumed to be fixed for all transmissions over the period of interest and the ratio of anticipated average arrival rates for the two users, also known as the relative traffic rate, is the system design parameter. A packet-based traffic model is considered where data for each user is queued at the transmit end. A queueing analog for this system leads to a coupled queueing system for which a simple policy is known to be throughput-optimal under Markovian assumptions. Since an exact expression for the performance is not available, as a measure of performance (in heavy traffic), a diffusion approximation is established. This diffusion process is a two-dimensional (2-D) Semimartingale Reflecting Brownian Motion (SRBM) living in the positive quadrant of 2-D space