Flexible uplink MU-MIMO scheduling in unlicensed spectrum

Utilizing the unlicensed spectrum as supplementary is being studied to meet the increasingly growing demand of user equipment for rate, traffic and bandwidth, and thus to mitigate the current spectrum scarcity crisis. In this paper, we investigate the uplink multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (UL MU-MIMO) technique to achieve multiplexing gain in unlicensed spectrum. We first define a new parameter called channel busy radio (CBR) which is related to the probability of occupying the unlicensed channel, and find that the failure to occupy the unlicensed channel leads to the performance degradation in unlicensed spectrum. Then, according to the user-specific CBR of the unlicensed channel, we propose a flexible scheduling scheme for UL MU-MIMO in unlicensed spectrum, and formulate an optimization problem for the optimal scheduled user number. Furthermore, an adaptive scheduling algorithm is proposed to decide the optimal number of the scheduled users efficiently. The simulation results show that, based on statistical channel condition in unlicensed spectrum, adjusting the number of the scheduled user flexibly can offset the degraded throughput and form an optimal MU-MIMO transmission.