High-speed downlink packet transmission with spatial multiplexing and scheduling

This paper considers packet transmission over a multiple-input-and-multiple-output (MIMO) Gaussian broadcast channel (GBC). Specifically, we compare and contrast two transmission strategies built on dirty paper coding (DPC) and the Bell labs layered space-time architecture (BLAST), respectively, under channel-aware scheduling, and demonstrate the advantage of a distributed MIMO architecture at a system performance level. For the DPC-based strategy, we also present an efficient suboptimal scheduling algorithm using equal transmit power allocation across users with a maximum order of spatial multiplexing which achieves near optimal scheduling performance for a sufficient number of users.