A Bandwidth Efficient Pairing Strategy for the MIMO-OFDM Based WLANs

The advanced MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) system can provide higher capacity gain or higher diversity gain in modern wireless networks. The capacity gain is achieved by interference cancellation technique to fully utilize the spatial degree of freedom. In a multiuser wireless system, the increased degrees of freedom provide the chance to select multiple wireless stations (STAs) to maximize the throughput. In this paper, we consider a scenario where the access point (AP) equipped with two antennas to simultaneously communicate with two STAs, each with single antenna. After obtaining the statuses of the size of buffered traffic and the achievable transmission rate, the AP should pair compatible STAs to minimize the loss of spatial degree of freedom. Therefore, three pairing algorithms are proposed and are evaluated through computer simulations. The algorithms have much less implementation complexity than the brute force pairing algorithm and achieve satisfactory performance of throughput.