Joint User Pairing and Power Allocation in Virtual MIMO Systems

Virtual multiple-input multiple-output (V-MIMO) is an effective way to achieve a diversity gain in uplink channels. A well-designed user pairing scheme in V-MIMO systems can exploit multiuser diversity to yield a significant performance gain. This paper investigates joint user pairing and power allocation problems in V-MIMO systems to maximize energy efficiency (EE) while guaranteeing spectrum efficiency (SE) under a total power consumption constraint. We formulate such a joint problem as a complex nonlinear optimization problem, which can be solved in two steps in M x K V-MIMO systems, i.e., power allocation with known user group and joint user pairing and power allocation. A multi-level water-filling method is used, and an iterative algorithm based on the outputs from the first step is employed in the second step. Finally, we propose a joint user pairing and power allocation scheme to find a user group that can achieve the maximum EE with power allocation. Simulation results and performance comparisons illustrate improved performance of the proposed scheme. Compared to the existing user pairing approaches, the proposed scheme achieves a significantly high EE gain while guaranteeing SE of a V-MIMO system.