Downlink scheduling of multiuser MIMO systems with transmit beamforming

This article deals with downlink scheduling for multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, where the base station communicates with multiple users simultaneously through transmit beamforming. Most of the existing transmission schemes for multiuser MIMO systems focus on optimizing sum rate performance of the system. The individual quality of service (QoS) requirements (such as packet delay and minimum transmission rate for the data traffic) are rarely considered. In this article, a novel scheduling strategy is proposed, where we try to optimize the global system performance under individual QoS constraints. By performing scheduling into two steps, namely successive user selection and power allocation, the scheduler can achieve efficient resource utilization while maintaining the QoS requirements of all users. Extensive simulations and analysis are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheduler.