A User Scheduling Algorithm via 3-D Space Separation in Interference Management

Multi-user (MU) interference in densely populated areas will degrade the system performance seriously. In this paper, we focus on the MU interference of downlink channel in a single cell based on the general standardized 3-D channel model. A large scale antenna array is equipped at the base station while single-antenna users (UE) are assumed. Considering the typical precodings such as zero-forcing, minimum-mean-square- error and matched-filter, we investigate the effects of various parameters, including the user number, user distribution dispersion (angle spread and average interval distance), pathloss, etc., on the key performance metric, signal-to-noise-and-interference- ratio (SINR). Results demonstrate that dense user distribution would result in extremely low SINR, which highlights the necessity of user scheduling to improve the system performance. Thus, we put forward a use scheduling algorithm via 3-D space separation, aiming to maximize the average interval distance among users divided into each group and achieve a high system sum rate. As expected, large sum rate gains are obtained, which lay a promising future for 3-D space utilization in interference management.