Performance analysis of rate-adaptive scheduling in MIMO systems with antenna selection

In this paper, we present a performance analysis of user scheduling for multiuser MIMO systems exploiting the multiuser and antenna diversities while maintaining the fairness among the users. We consider different scheduling schemes including absolute throughput-based scheduling, absolute SNR-based scheduling, and normalized SNR-based scheduling schemes. We also propose the utilization of an antenna selection scheme to overcome the drawback of channel hardening in multiuser MIMO systems. This also improves the system performance and reduces the system complexity. We derive closed-form expressions for the average spectral efficiency of the system under study for each scheduling scheme. Using the results obtained from the closed-form expressions, we compare the presented schemes and show their significant advantages in terms of fairness of scheduling and spectral efficiency.