Utility-Based Scheduling and Fixed Switching Beamforming for User Satisfaction Improvement in OFDMA Systems

In this paper, we consider the problem of improving the percentage of satisfied users in the downlink of an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) system that provides non-real time services. Therefore, we propose an utilitybased scheduling algorithm that uses a sigmoidal utility function combined with Fixed Switching Beamforming (FSB) to exploit several kinds of diversity, such as time, frequency, space and multi-user, in order to achieve the pursued objective. System-level simulation results demonstrate that there is an optimal number of spatial beams to be used by FSB, and that the proposed joint scheduling and beamforming provides higher user satisfaction than other classical techniques found in the literature.