A New Approach to User Scheduling in Massive Multi-User MIMO Broadcast Channels

In this paper, a new two-phase-feedback-based user-scheduling-and-beamforming method is proposed for multi-user multiple-input multiple-output downlink in the context of two-stage beamforming. The key ideas of the proposed method are: 1) to use a set of orthogonal reference beams and construct a cone around each reference beam to select “nearly-optimal” semi-orthogonal users based only on channel quality indicator feedback; and 2) to apply post-user-selection beam design with zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF) based on channel state information (CSI) feedback only from the selected users. It is proven that the proposed scheduling-and-beamforming method is asymptotically optimal as the number of users increase. Furthermore, the proposed scheduling-and-beamforming method almost achieves the performance of the existing semi-orthogonal user selection with ZFBF that requires full CSI for all users, with a significantly reduced amount of required channel information which is even less than that required by random beamforming.