A Feedback Quantization Scheme Leveraging Fairness and Throughput for Heterogeneous Multi-User Diversity Systems

We propose a feedback quantization scheme for downlink multiuser diversity systems. The scheme is designed for heterogeneous users, i.e., users operating under different levels of mean signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). The proposed scheme equally distributes the channel access time to user clusters and, at the same time, maximizes the sum-rate capacity under equal-channel-access-time constraint. The method is compared to a normalized SNR scheduler, full-feedback scheduler, and finite-rate feedback scheduler without fairness consideration to illustrate the performance gaps between different modes of operation.