On the performance of opportunistic beamforming

Opportunistic beamforming (OB) which exploits the advantages of both multiuser diversity and proportional fairness (PF) scheduling is shown to increase the downlink throughput of a system. In this paper, simulation results of delay and throughput performance with respect to the rate of antenna pattern updates are described. A channel model is used which includes shadowing effects, path loss and Rayleigh fading. The results indicate a favourable throughput performance with increasing antenna update rates while the delay performance shows a trade off between average delay and 90 percentile values in which the latter favour the use of OB.