User Selection Methods for Overcoming Growing Number of Served Users in Massive MIMO Systems

Massive MIMO is dominant in the current wireless communication systems. Massive MIMO system uses a massive number of antennas to serve multi-users simultaneously. The growth of served users in the system will increase the interference between them and affect the system’s performance. To maintain the qualified service for the growing number of users, user selection techniques can be used to separate users into groups to be served well. This paper proposes three user selection methods named Mean Step User Selection (MSUS), Second Null User Selection (SNUS), and Interference Threshold User Selection (ITUS) methods. These three user selection methods aim to serve users with the best possible performance. The performance of these proposed user selection methods will be evaluated and compared with the performance of the system without selection and with the system using other user selection methods such as Random User Selection (RUS), Semi-orthogonal User Selection (SUS), and Inter-Channel Interference Based Selection (ICIBS) methods. The simulation shows that the proposed MSUS, SNUS, and ITUS methods provide an improvement in the spectral efficiency of 75.39%, 92.13%, and 153.71% when compared with the system without the selection method. The proposed user selection methods also improve performance compared to other user selection methods.