Decentralized Joint Beamforming, User Scheduling, and QoS Management in 5G and Beyond Systems

Fifth generation cellular systems support a broad range of services, including mobile broadband, critical and massive Internet of Things and are used in a variety of scenarios. In many of these scenarios, the main challenge is maintaining high throughput and ensuring proper quality of service (QoS) in irregular topologies. In multiple-input multiple-output systems, this challenge translates to designing linear transmit and receive beamformers that maximize the system throughput and manage QoS constraints. In this article, we argue that this basic design task in 5G and beyond systems must be extended such that beamforming design and user scheduling are managed jointly. Specifically, we propose a fully decentralized joint beamforming design and user scheduling algorithm that manages QoS. A novel feature of this scheme is its ability to reduce the initial rate requirements in case of infeasibility. By means of simulations that model contemporary 5G scenarios, we show that the proposed decentralized scheme outperforms benchmarking algorithms that do not support minimum rate requirements and previously proposed algorithms that support QoS requirements.