On Throughput-Fairness Tradeoff in Virtual MIMO Systems with Limited Feedback

We investigate the performance of channel-aware scheduling algorithms designed for the downlink of a wireless communication system. Our study focuses on a two-transmit antenna cellular system, where the base station can only rely on quantized versions of channel state information to carry out scheduling decisions. The motivation is to study the interaction between throughput and fairness of practical spatial multiplexing schemes when implemented using existing physical layer signaling, such as the one that exists in current wideband code division multiple access downlink. Virtual MIMO system selects at each time instant a pair of users that report orthogonal (quantized) channels. Closed-form expressions for the achievable sum-rate of three different channel-aware scheduling rules are presented using an analytical framework that is derived in this work. Our analysis reveals that simple scheduling procedures allow to reap a large fraction (in the order of 80%) of the sum-rate performance that greedy scheduling provides. This overall throughput performance is obtained without affecting considerably the optimal short-term fairness behavior that the end users would perceive.