Spatial Transmission Mode Switching in Multiuser MIMO-OFDM Systems With User Fairness

Multiantenna radio systems allow accessing the channel in diversity or spatial multiplexing (SMUX) mode. Adequate switching between these modes according to current channel conditions was shown to yield significant performance improvements while requiring little feedback from the receiving side. We present a transmission concept for the downlink of a multiuser multiple-input-multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division-multiplexing (MU-MIMO-OFDM) system aiming at high user rates with limited feedback demands. An extended score-based scheduling (SB) approach ensures fair-resource allocation to the users, whereas transmission mode switching is used to guarantee high user rates. The degree of fairness of the scheduler can be adapted by adequately configuring a weighting function for the scores. Comparison with single-mode schemes reveals substantial throughput gains of the adaptive switching concept. Furthermore, targeting maximum throughput, we show that a considerable proportion of the capacity of the MIMO broadcast channel (BC) can be achieved with a comparatively low amount of required feedback.