Joint Scheduling and Beamforming for Delay Sensitive Traffic with Priorities and Deadlines

Packet scheduling in 5G networks can significantly affect the performance of beamforming techniques since the allocation of multiple users to the same time-frequency block causes interference between users. A combination of beamforming and scheduling can thus improve the performance of multi-user MIMO systems. Furthermore, in realistic conditions, data packets have both priority and deadlines beyond which they become obsolete. In this paper we propose a simple scheduling algorithm which takes priorities and deadlines into account and allocates users dynamically to resource blocks and spatial beams according to the Tomlinson-Harashima precoder. We demonstrate the merits of the proposed technique compared to other state-of-the art scheduling methods through simulations.