QoS-Guaranteed Multiuser Scheduling in MIMO Broadcast Channels

This paper proposes a new multiuser scheduling algorithm that can simultaneously support a variety of different quality-of-service (QoS) user groups while satisfying fairness among users in the same QoS group in MIMO broadcast channels. Toward this goal, the proposed algorithm consists of two parts: a QoS-aware fair (QF) scheduling within a QoS group and an antenna trade-off scheme between different QoS groups. The proposed QF scheduling algorithm finds a user set from a certain QoS group which can satisfy the fairness among users in terms of throughput or delay. The antenna trade-off scheme can minimize the QoS violations of a higher priority user group by trading off the number of transmit antennas allocated to different QoS groups. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed QF scheduling method satisfies different types of fairness among users and can adjust the degree of fairness among them. The antenna trade-off scheme combined with QF scheduling can improve the probability of QoS-guaranteed transmission when supporting different QoS groups.