Switched multi-radio transmission diversity in future access networks

In this paper we study packet scheduling algorithms which exploit multi-radio transmission diversity in a multi-radio access network. We view the packet scheduling process as a combination of user scheduling and radio access allocation. A number of such schemes are proposed and their performance is evaluated via simulations in a multi-cell environment. It is shown that the use of such schemes across a total of six uncoupled radio accesses can result in average gains of up to 60% in spectral efficiency, as compared to scenarios where the radio accesses operate independently.