Spatial multiuser pairing scheduling strategies for virtual MIMO systems

This paper investigates the spatial multiuser scheduling strategies that apply different pairing criteria to select a pair of users carrying out transmission simultaneously in virtual MIMO (VMIMO) systems. Five kinds of criteria are described and compared, which are categorized as channel correlation minimization, bit error rate (BER) minimization and capacity maximization depending on their diverse starting points. The system throughput and user fairness are simulated and analyzed. As the results show, the proposed criteria can make full use of channel state information provided by the physical layer and can be compatible with different antenna deployments, and in addition, through obtaining more spatial diversity gain and multiuser diversity gain, the VMIMO system with spatial pairing scheduling approaches remarkably improve the system performance comparing to the MIMO system with single user scheduling.