Rate Scheduling in Multiple Antenna Downlink Wireless Systems

We consider scheduling strategies for multiantenna and multibeam cellular wireless systems for high-speed packet data services on the downlink. We establish a fundamental connection between the stability region of the queuing system and the set of feasible transmission rates, which provides the basis for the scheduling algorithm proposed in this paper. Transmission using adaptive steerable beams and fixed sector beams are considered and average delay versus throughput results are obtained through simulations for the proposed scheduling scheme in each case. While in single antenna systems multiuser diversity gains are achieved by the scheduling algorithms that transmit to a single user in each scheduling interval, our results show that with multiple antennas, transmitting to a carefully chosen subset of users has superior performance. The multiantenna scheduling problem is closely related to the problem of coordinated scheduling for transmission through multiple base stations, where a user can receive signals from several base stations simultaneously. We consider the special case when three single-antenna base stations are allowed to cooperate and transmit to the users in the triangular region between the base stations and propose scheduling strategies that demonstrate significant gains.