Multiuser Diversity in Cellular Downlink Using the Queued-Code

We consider the problem of providing explicit quality of service (QoS) guarantees to multiple users sharing a downlink time-slotted fading channel. We present a scheduler that can achieve a significant gain in terms of QoS, compared to a scheduler that uses a fixed time-slot assignment. QoS guarantees are provided for each user by using the queued-code framework which efficiently captures both, the queuing behavior at the link layer, and encoding/decoding at the physical layer. Numerical results show that our approach results in significantly better QoS compared to the fixed-slot assignment scheme, in a variety of communication scenarios.