Downlink scheduling with adaptive antennas in multicell SDMA packet access networks

Abstract

This paper investigates the performance of scheduling on a SDMA multicellular packet access systems. Scheduling with spatial division multiple access (SDMA) has been considered on the uplink of a single cell with an ad-hoc scheduling algorithm [Hujun Yin et al., 2002]. Here we consider the downlink of a multicell network and we first apply wireless fair queuing scheduling to SDMA, in the new multicellular environment. We consider the issues related to beamforming, intercell interference and fairness among users. We take into account heterogeneous traffic classes with different QoS requirements and we show that the proposed scheme is feasible in the new multicellular SDMA environment. It increases system capacity for delay sensitive users and achieve better per user QoS performance with respect to the known earliest due date (EDD) strategy and the baseline case of first-come first-served (FCFS), in the same environment.