User scheduling for large multi-beam satellite MIMO systems

Very large size MIMO systems (hundreds of antennas) are practically relevant, for instance in the return link of satellite communications. Indeed, satellites routinelly have about one hundred beams and hundreds of terminals may be present in each beam. Scheduling can become very challenging in in this large-size scenario: an arbitrarily selected scheduling plan may result in users with low offered rates; on the other hand searching for the best scheduling plan is unfeasible due to the huge number of possible combinations. This work proposes a low complexity heuristic based on graph theory to find a scheduling plan that well balances the offered rates to the served users.