Prediction of Downlink SNR for Opportunistic Beamforming

Opportunistic beamforming (OBF) is a technique to jointly increase the throughput and quality of service (QoS) in a multiuser system with fair and channel-aware scheduling. With this technique, the channel dynamics are influenced such that fading peaks occur more often within a given period of time. Channel-aware scheduling requires reliable SNR information in the base station that is obtained via feedback information from the users. Since this feedback is not instantaneous, the problem caused by a feedback delay are exacerbated by OBF because of higher channel dynamics. In this paper, a SNR predictor is derived for OBF that is matched to the beamforming process.