A Space-Time Batch-service Queueing Model for Multi-user MIMO Communication Systems

Multi-user MIMO allows the simultaneous transmission of several link-layer frames directed to different users by exploiting the channel's spatial streams, increasing proportionally the effective channel capacity. Nevertheless, the system performance can be further increased if several frames directed to the same user are combined together on a temporal scale (i.e. packet aggregation), taking benefit from both space and time dimensions. In this paper, a novel finite-buffer space-time general-distributed batch-service queueing model for such a system is presented. Results show the flexibility and accuracy of our queuing model, providing also a first insight on the relation between the space and temporal aggregation parameters and how they can be adjusted to maximise the system performance.