On the User Selection for MIMO Broadcast Channels

In this paper, a downlink communication system, in which a base station (BS) equipped with antennas communicates with users each equipped with receive antennas, is considered. An efficient suboptimum algorithm is proposed for selecting a set of users in order to maximize the sum-rate throughput of the system, in a Rayleigh-fading environment. For the asymptotic case when tends to infinity, the necessary and sufficient conditions in order to achieve the maximum sum-rate throughput, such that the difference between the achievable sum-rate and the maximum value approaches zero, is derived. The complexity of our algorithm is investigated in terms of the required amount of feedback from the users to the BS, as well as the number of searches required for selecting the users. It is shown that the proposed method is capable of achieving a large portion of the sum-rate capacity, with a very low complexity.