Spectral Clustering Aided User Grouping and Scheduling in Wideband MU-MIMO Systems

Multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) technologies can help provide rapidly growing needs for high data rates in modern wireless networks. Co-channel interference (CCI) among users in the same resource-sharing group (RSG) presents a serious user scheduling challenge to achieve high overall MU-MIMO capacity. Since CCI is closely related to correlation among spatial user channels, it would be natural to schedule co-channel user groups with low inter-user channel correlation. Yet, establishing RSGs with low co-channel correlations for large user populations is an NP-hard problem. More practically, user scheduling for wideband channels exhibiting distinct channel characteristics in each frequency band remains an open question. In this work, we proposed a novel wideband user grouping and scheduling algorithm named SC-MS. The proposed SC-MS algorithm first leverages spectral clustering to obtain a preliminary set of user groups. Next, we apply a post-processing step to identify user cliques from the preliminary groups to further mitigate CCI. Our last step groups users into RSGs for scheduling such that the sum of user clique sizes across the multiple frequency bands is maximized. Simulation results demonstrate network performance gain over benchmark methods in terms of sum rate and fairness.