Beamforming and scheduling strategies for time slotted multiuser MIMO systems

We investigate the problem of scheduling for the uplink of a time slotted multiuser MIMO system with sum capacity as the performance metric. We first consider scheduling users' transmissions for fixed transmit beamformers and construct a low complexity scheduling algorithm. Since the performance of the system depends on the transmit beamformers, we consider transmit beamformer selection next and combine the proposed scheduling algorithm with perfectly controlled transmit beam-forming, eigen transmit beamforming and antenna selection. We observe that as the feedback level is increased, the performance of the scheduling algorithm is improved. In particular, a substantial gain is attained when the individual channel state information (CSI) is available at the transmitter side.