Proportional fair scheduling for wireless communication with multiple transmit and receive antennas

The effective applications of the proportional fair scheduling (PFS) scheme are investigated for the downlink of a cellular system with multiple transmit and receive antennas. We propose an improved PFS scheme based on spatial multiplexing (SM), referred to as P-PFS/SM, after reviewing the conventional PFS scheme based on spatial diversity (C-PFS/SD) and that based on spatial multiplexing (C-PFS/SM). The proposed PFS scheme exploits the space domain as well as the multiuser domain in scheduling, improving the system throughput. The performance of the P-PFS/SM scheme is compared with that of the C-PFS/SD and C-PFS/SM schemes in terms of the system throughput and user throughput. It is shown that the P-PFS/SM scheme is not much advantageous compared to the C-PFS/SM scheme without power control. However, the P-PFS/SM scheme is found to provide significant throughput improvement over the C-PFS/SD and C-PFS/SM schemes, when long-term power control is adopted.