A Novel and Effective User Scheduling Scheme for Heterogeneous Scenario in LTE-A System

In this paper, we investigate user pairing scheduling algorithm in heterogeneous scenario, where users experience different channel characteristics. Since for most practical downlink multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) long term evolution-advanced (LTE-A) systems, users are almost with distinct features. Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) transmission technology is widely used to alleviate inter-cell interference, which quite suitable for heterogeneous network. However, most of the existing scheduling algorithms focus on the homogeneous scenario. Hence, it is necessary to extend user scheduling scheme to heterogeneous scenario. A novel and effective scheme is proposed for heterogeneous scenario in LTE-A system. The proposed scheme synthetically takes both users fairness and system capacity into account. Moreover, it quantifies the two above-mentioned factors which lead to much less complexity compared with exhaust algorithm. System-level Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the traditional scheduling schemes in terms of cell edge spectrum efficiency and cell average spectrum efficiency.