User Scheduling for Heterogeneous Multiuser MIMO Systems: A Subspace Viewpoint

In downlink multiuser multiple-input-multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems, users are practically heterogeneous. However, many existing user-scheduling algorithms are designed with an implicit assumption that users are homogeneous. In this paper, we revisit the problem by exploring the characteristics of heterogeneous users from a subspace viewpoint. With an objective of minimizing interference nonorthogonality among users, three new angular-based user-scheduling criteria are proposed. While the first criterion is heuristically determined by identifying the incapability of the largest principal angle to characterize subspace correlation and, hence, interference nonorthogonality between users, the second and third criteria are derived by using the sum rate capacity bounds with block diagonalization and the change in capacity by adding a new user into an existing user subset, respectively. Aiming to capture fairness among heterogeneous users while maintaining multiuser diversity gain, two new hybrid user-scheduling algorithms, whose computational complexities are only linearly proportional to the number of users, are proposed. We show by simulations the effectiveness of our proposed user-scheduling criteria and algorithms with respect to those commonly used in a homogeneous environment.