Scheduling for maximum capacity in S/TDMA systems

Space-time division multiple access (S/TDMA) applies spatial multiplexing enabled by antenna arrays on top of time-division multiplexing. Packet scheduling in S/TDMA can be described as a partition of a given set of packets such that the packets in each subset can be properly separated in the space domain and thus be assigned to the same time slot in a TDMA frame. This paper presents a information-theoretic framework for packet scheduling in S/TDMA systems by deriving the S/TDMA channel capacity as a function of the partition scheme. Optimization of the packet scheduling then can be performed by maximizing the channel capacity. The paper also presents a graph theory model for the optimization problem. It shows that that the optimization is to find a proper dominating set in an associated graph.