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Master Thesis
Electrical Engineering Emphasis on Telecommunications
Thesis no: MEE10:78
September 2010.

User Scheduling Algorithm for

MU-MIMO System with limited feedback

Sudhir Kumar Burra (861019-4717)

Reddy Prasad Reddy Yendrapalli (860808-1553)

Under the esteemed guidance of

Prof. Abbas Mohammed

Blekinge Institute of Technology

September 2010

Department of Electrical Engineering

School of Engineering
Blekinge Institute of Technology
SE-37179 Karlskrona
Sweden.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We express our sincere gratitude to our guide Prof. A B B A S M O H A M M E D for his

guidance and constant encouragement throughout the project work. We are very grateful to him
for providing us his valuable time through various sessions to discuss the issues related to our
thesis work which enabled us to take this thesis to fruitful completion.

Special thanks to Mr. MICHAEL ASMAN, Program Manager for DDP in SWEDEN, for
his valuable suggestions and guidance during the entire course work.

We would like to thank Mr. GURUDUTT KUMAR VELPULA, International Coordinator

for DDP, for providing us the opportunity to study in BTH, SWEDEN and also we would like to

thank Dr. MADHAVI LATHA, Coordinator for DDP, JNTU.

We would like to convey our heartful thanks to all the Professors of BTH and JNTU for

their immense help and moral support in completing our course work successfully.

We express our sincere thanks to all my friends at BTH, who supported us during our stay
in SWEDEN and made it really enjoyable and memorable.

We are very grateful to our parents and our sisters for their support and constant
encouragement.

Sudhir Kumar Burra

Reddy Prasad Reddy Yendrapalli.
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ABSTRACT

In conventional cellular systems, each base station (BS) transmits signals intended for a single
user in a particular resource allocation. As bandwidth is a scarce resource, effective utilization of
the available bandwidth in the system is essential in modern wireless systems especially for
applications such as video streaming and voice over internet protocol (VoIP) which demands
high data rate. Fortunately since the users feedback the channel state information to the network,
there is an opportunity for the BS to schedule more than one users data in a single resource
allocation by designing precoders which beamform the data to the intended user. This technique
which is called multi-user multiple-input and multiple-output (MU-MIMO) is adopted in the
evolving radio interface technologies. For properly utilizing the feedback information,
scheduling algorithms are designed which selects pairs of users which would maximize system
capacity. In this thesis we describe MU-MIMO technique with codebook based precoding that
has been proposed for the IEEE 802.16m mobile broadband standard. A multi-user proportional
fair (PF) scheduling algorithm is designed to improve both sum capacity and fairness among
users.

Key words: MU-MIMO, Bandwidth, Limited feedback, Data rate, Precoder.

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GLOSSARY

AWGN Additive White Gaussian Noise

BS Base Station

CCI Co-Channel Interference

CQI Channel Quality Indicator

CL Closed Loop

DR DataRegion

FDD Frequency Division Duplex

LOS Line Of Sight

LTE Long Term Evolution

LTE-A Long Term Evolution Advanced

MIMO Multiple Input Multiple Output

MMSE Minimum Mean Square Error

MRC Maximum Ratio Combining

MS Mobile Station

MU-MIMO Multi User MIMO

MUI Multilingual User Interface

OFDM Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing

OL Open Loop

PF Proportional Fair

PMI Precoder Matrix Information

QoS Quality of Service

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RF Radio Frequency

SFBC Space Frequency Block Coding

SINR Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio

SISO Single Input Single Output

SNR Signal to Noise Ratio

STBC Space Time Block Coding

UE User Environment

UT User Terminal

VoIP Voice over Internet Protocol

ZF Zero Forcing
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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Abstract. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

1 Introduction 9
1.1 Motivation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10
1.2 Objectives. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.3 Back ground . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.4 Outline. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

2 Theory of MIMO System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13

2.1 MIMO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13
2.2 MIMO System. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.3 MIMO Precoding 15
2.3.1 Optimal Unitary or SVD precoding. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16
2.3.2 Codebook Based Precoding. . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.3.3 Zero Forcing Precoding 16
2.3.4 Dirty Paper Precoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16

3 Literature Survey 17
3.1 Multi User MIMO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3.1.1 Spatial Diversity Gain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3.1.2 Spatial Multiplexing Gain. . . . . . . . . . . . 17
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3.1.3 Multi User Diversity Gain. . . . . . 18

3.2 Challenges of MU-MIMO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
3.2.1 Interference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
3.2.2 Post-processing. . . . . . . . . . . . 19
3.2.3 Pre-processing/Precoding. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20
3.2.4 CQI Modelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
3.2.5 Scheduling. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
3.3 Precoding Techniques of MU-MIMO . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
3.3.1 Zero Forcing Beamforming and Unitary Precoding . . . .21
3.3.2 Channel Inversion Method and Diagnolization Method.21
3.4 System Model. . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
3.4.1 Uncorrelated Channel Model . . . . . . . . . . . 23
3.4.2 Correlated Channel Model. . . . . . . . . . . . 24
3.5 Proportional Fair Scheduler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

4 Mathematical Procedure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..25

4.1 MU-MIMO Capacity Formulation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
4.1.1 MMSE Receiver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
4.1.2 CQI Calculation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
4.2 Procedure 29

5 Results and Discussion…………………………………………… 31

6 Conclusions and Future work.. ……………………………………. 36

7 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .37

7
Ref
eren
ces
…
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List of Figures

2.1 MIMO system. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

2.2 MIMO pre and post processing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15

3.1 MU-MIMO system setup. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

4.1 Procedure for MU-MIMO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

5.1 Sum capacity of MU-MIMO for 4×2 with uncorrelated channel. . . . . . . . . . 33

5.2 Sum capacity of MU-MIMO for 4×1with uncorrelated channel. . . . . . . . . . .33

5.3 Sum capacity of MU-MIMO for 4×2 with correlated channel. . . . . . . . . . . . 34

5.4 Sum capacity of MU-MIMO for 4×1 with correlated channel. . . . . . . . . . .. 34

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CHAPTER 1
1. INTRODUCTION

As the demand for high data rate applications like video and audio streaming, VoIP, video
conferencing are increasing, future wireless systems should be able to provide high speed broad
band services for mobile users with sufficient quality of service (QoS) support. As the bandwidth
and power are scarce or limited resources, techniques which lead to efficient utilization of these
resources are quite necessary in the next generation wireless systems. At the same time the
wireless channel creates a challenging environment because of variety of channel impairments.
Thus, future wireless systems are to be designed taking all these factors into consideration.

For scenarios with a large number of users to be served in one cell, high capacity
gains can be achieved by transmitting independent data streams to different users sharing the
same time-frequency resources. This technique is referred to as multi-user multiple-input
multiple-output (MU-MIMO) [1]. It is one of t he techniques which can be used in cellular
systems to increase spectral efficiency.

In MU-MIMO operation two or more user environment’s (UE) share the same time-
frequency resources. Several parallel data streams are transmitted simultaneously, one for
each UE. It is assumed that the UE feeds back a quantized version of the observed channel, so
that base station (BS) can schedule in MU-MIMO mode terminals with good channel
separation.

Long term evolution (LTE) and its successor LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) are some of next
generation wireless systems, which use advanced features like MIMO, link adaptation,
orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and many other techniques to help in
achieving high spectral efficiencies.
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1.1 MOTIVATION

MIMO systems which employ multiple antennas at transmitter and receiver is a very
useful technique in wireless environments to combat the effects of fading and to use the radio
channel efficiently by transmitting multiple streams to a user in the same resource allocation,
thus achieving diversity gain and multiplexing gain, w h i c h i s the first step in achieving high
spectral efficiencies. Transmit diversity (space frequency block coding) is one such scheme
which sends multiple copies of the same data to a user which makes use of multiple replicas of
transmitted data to combat fading. This is a very useful scheme in fast fading environments. Also
the fact that each user experiences different channel conditions and quantized channel state
information is available at the BS, which can be utilized to achieve additional gain by jointly
precoding users which makes them orthogonal to each other. Thus allowing the BS to schedule
more than one user in a resource allocation. This leads to a situation where efficient user
scheduling and pairing algorithms are required, which uses the feedback information
intelligently at BS to maximize the capacity achievable in the system.
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1.2 OBJECTIVE

The main goal is to study and evaluate the performance of MU-MIMO

systems using feedback sent by the users.

 Create a cellular environment with single or multiple BSs with multiple users with
multiple antennas spread randomly positioned inside the cells.
 First the BS will transmit reference symbols which are known to the users.
 Calculate signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) and sum capacity.
 Plot the graph of sum capacity vs signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).

1.3 Background

MU-MIMO has generated considerable interest recently. The main idea emerging from
this research is that multiple users can be simultaneously multiplexed to take simultaneous
advantage of multi-user and spatial diversity. The optimal BS interference cancellation strategy
is the so called dirty paper coding (DPC) [6], but it is not directly practical. More realistic linear
multi-user precoding techniques have been developed. BS does not have knowledge of the
channel unless it is feedback by the mobile station (MS) such as in the case of Frequency Division
Duplex (FDD) systems. It is huge amount for MS to feedback the complete channel, hence
quest for finite feedback systems arises. One of the solutions to this problem is codebook based
precoding technique which is a linear precoding technique. Here, a codebook which contains a
set of precoding matrices known to the BS and MS is used.

This thesis describes MU-MIMO technique with codebook based precoding that has
been proposed for the IEEE 802.16m mobile broadband standard. A multi-user PF scheduling
algorithm is designed to improve both sum capacity and fairness among users.
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1.4 Outline
Chapter 2
This chapter will give a detailed description of MIMO systems.
Chapter 3
This chapter will give a detailed description of MU-MIMO systems.
Chapter 4
This chapter will discuss the actual formulation used to calculate channel quality indicator (CQI)
and capacity of users.
Chapter 5
This chapter includes the MATLAB results and discussion.
Chapter 6
This chapter presents the conclusions.
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CHAPTER 2

2. Theory of MIMO System

2.1 MIMO
The use of multiple antennas allows independent channels to be created in space and it is
possible to achieve spatial diversity, which can be created without any additional bandwidth
and transmit power. In addition to providing spatial diversity, antenna arrays can be used to
focus energy (beamforming) or create multiple parallel channels for carrying unique data
streams (spatial multiplexing). When multiple antennas are used at both the transmitter and the
receiver, it is commonly referred as MIMO system. These systems can be used to:

 Increase the system reliability (decrease the bit or packet error rate).

 Increase the achievable data rate and hence system capacity.

 Increase the coverage area.

 Decrease the required transmits power.

However, these four desirable attributes usually compete with one another. For example, an
increase in data rate will often require an increase in either the error rate or transmit power.
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2.2 MIMO System

Figure 2.1 shows MIMO system where there are M (>1) antennas at the BS and N (>1)
antennas at the MS.

1 1

2 2

BS . H . MS
M N

Figure 2.1: MIMO System

The wireless channel matrix H can be expressed as

 h11 h12  h1M 

 
h h22  h2 M 
H   21
   
 
 hN 1 hN 2  hNM  NXM
(2.1)

where hij is the channel gain from ith receive antenna to the j th transmit antenna. In case of
MIMO systems along with diversity, spatial multiplexing can also be exploited which refers
to breaking the incoming high rate data stream into M independent data streams. Assuming that
the streams can be successfully decoded, the nominal spectral efficiency is thus increased by a
factor of M. This is certainly exciting which implies that adding antenna elements can greatly
increase the viability of the high data rates desired for wireless broadband access. The MS has to

estimate M×1 transmit vector from N×1 receive vector. In order to adjust the number of
streams, some sort of pre-processing also called precoding is done before actual transmission,
which can be thought as a kind of beamforming. More insights about MIMO can be found in
reference [2]. MIMO systems can be classified as:
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 Single-user or Multi-user

When a single-user is scheduled in a dataregion it is referred as single-user MIMO (SU-

MIMO). If more than one user is scheduled in a dataregion then it becomes MU-MIMO.
These two are differ in terms of precoding and scheduling. The number of streams allocated to
each user is configurable.

 Open loop or Closed loop

When the precoders are fixed to subbands and chosen from a codebook which is known to
BS and MS is referred as Open loop MIMO (OL-MIMO). If the precoders are formed by the
scheduler based on the preferred matrix index (PMI) feedback from each of the MSs, then it is
called Closed loop MIMO (CL-MIMO).

From the above classification, there are four possible MIMO configurations:
(1) OL-SU-MIMO (2) OL-MU-MIMO (3) CL-SU-MIMO (4) CL-MU-MIMO.

2.3 MIMO precoding

Precoding is done mainly to map K transmitted symbols to M transmitting antennas. In case of

SU-MIMO these K symbols belong to single-user, whereas in MU-MIMO they are intended
for K different users (assuming single stream per user). There are various ways of precoding,
some of them are discussed here in brief.


x1 1 1 x1

x2 Pre 2 2 Post x2
. Processing . . processing .
. . . .

xK M N xk

Figure 2.2: MIMO pre and post processing.

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2.3.1 Optimal Unitary or SVD precoding

In case of SU-MIMO, when the channel is known at the transmitter, the best precoder to use is
the matrix formed by the right singular vectors of the channel, which has proven to achieve the
channel capacity of MIMO systems, at the cost of feeding back signaling of the channel state
information from MS to the BS.

2.3.2 Codebook based precoding

Here a codebook which contains a set of precoders is known at the transmitter and receiver.
In case of OL-MU-MIMO, precoders are fixed to all the subbands and the user needs to
feedback which precoding vector in the precoder is to be used to precode the data. Detail
description on how code books are designed is found in references [7] and [8].

2.3.3 Zero Forcing (ZF) precoding

For SU-MIMO the precoder is just the pseudo inverse of the channel, which can completely
cancel out the inter stream interference and reproduce the data vector transmitted with additive
noise. In case of MU-MIMO the precoder has to cancel out multi-user interference, so a block
diagonalization method is proposed in reference [9] which is used to find the precoder under
some constraints.

2.3.4 Dirty Paper Coding (DPC)

All the techniques discussed previously were linear techniques, but DPC is a non-linear coding
technique that pre-cancels known interference without power penalty. Once the transmitter is
assumed to know the interference signal regardless of channel state information knowledge at
the receiver. This category includes Costa Precoding, Tomlinson-Harashima Precoding and the
Vector Perturbation Technique as discussed in references [4] and [5].
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CHAPTER 3

3. Literature Survey of MU-MIMO

3.1 MU-MIMO

In MU-MIMO more than one user can be served in the same bandwidth using appropriate
precoders at BS. This technique is just like SU-MIMO where one or more streams transmitted
at a time using multiple antennas belonging to the same user. In MU-MIMO each stream could
belong to a different user i.e., instead of stream multiplexing, MU-MIMO does user
multiplexing. For scenarios where large number of users is to be served in one cell or to serve a
limited number of users with increased throughput, MU-MIMO can be used.

The three gains that are useful in increasing the performance of MU-MIMO systems are
defined as follows [11].

3.1.1 Spatial diversity gain

This is the technique for improving communication quality by transmitting and receiving
with multiple antennas. Each pair of transmit and receive antennas provides a signal path by
sending signals that carry the same information through different paths. Hence multiple
independently faded replicas of the data symbol can be obtained and more reliable reception is
achieved.

3.1.2 Spatial multiplexing gain

This is the performance improvement derived from using multiple antennas to transmit
multiple signal flows through space in parallel. For a MIMO system with Nt transmitting
antennas and Nr receiving antennas, the maximum achievable spatial multiplexing gain is
minimum of Nt and Nr .
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3.1.3 Multi-user diversity gain

The improvement in system throughput derived from using a scheduler which exploits the
disparities fading and interference characteristics between users.
The first two (spatial diversity gain, spatial multiplexing gain) can be typically achieved
using precoders at the transmitter side by using the feedback information sent by UE and using
multiple antennas. But the latter can be achieved by using proper scheduling techniques.

MU-MIMO offers additional degrees of freedom when compared to SU-MIMO since

multiple users are multiplexed in the same physical channel. This can be achieved by pairing
users whose precoders are orthogonal to each other in a dataregion and then precoding them
appropriately so that each user sees only its own information. As UE feedback quantized
channel information, the users will not be perfectly orthogonal to each other so some remnant
inter user interference will be seen by each of the users who are paired. This can be minimized
by using a minimum mean square error (MMSE) receiver at UE to minimize the effect of
multilingual user interference (MUI) on capacity [17].

The main advantages that lead to MIMO paradigm shift to MU-MIMO from SU-MIMO
communications are

1. MU-MIMO schemes allow for direct gain in multiple-access capacity (proportional to

number of transmit antennas) because of multiplexing of data of several users in the same radio
channel.

2. MU-MIMO schemes are more immune to loss of channel rank because of line of sight
(LOS) conditions or antenna correlation, which is a major problem that causes performance
degradation in SU-MIMO communications.
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3.2 Challenges of MU-MIMO

MU-MIMO has tremendous benefits which are achieved by overcoming some challenges.
Multiple users using the same resources at the same time would lead to several issues that need
to be considered, some of them are mentioned here.

3.2.1 Interference

When multiple users are using the same resources at the same time, there would be
severe interference between their signals. Each user should be capable of decoding his
respective stream by reducing the interference due to other stream. This can be achieved by
careful pre-processing at the transmitter and post-processing at the receiver.

3.2.2 Post-processing

In single-user transmission, MIMO could be used for spatial multiplexing, where

multiple symbols are transmitted to the same user. For example, consider a 2×2 single-user
system, in which the received vector can be represented as

y = Hx + n (3.1)

where the transmitted 2×1 vector x represents 2 symbols that are transmitted simultaneously
to a particular user, thus doubling the user throughput. In order to decode the 2 symbols from

the received 2×1 vector y, a simple approach would be to build a linear receiver that
diagonalises the system, i.e., multiply the received vector y by H−1. This decouples the system
and we get back the two transmitted symbols.

In the MU-MIMO case, the effective received vector y, is a concatenation of the

symbols received by geographically separated users, and post processing must be done in such
a way to reduce the interference from the other user. Several receiver configurations such as

MMSE, maximum ratio combining (MRC) and ZF are possible but MMSE receiver is shown to
reduce the interference effectively.
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3.2.3 Pre-processing/precoding

Because of this limitation on the interference cancellation that can be done at the MS,
good precoders need to be designed, such that we beamform efficiently towards the two users.
However this would require good knowledge of the channels to both users at the BS, which
requires heavy amounts of feedback. So we would need to come up with the best possible
precoders to use at the BS, with a limitation on the feedback rate.

3.2.4 Channel Quality Indicator (CQI) modeling

CQI is a feedback by the user in frame (n), for the allocation of modulation and coding
schemes in frame (n+1). CQI modeling is to be done so that the user experiences a good
throughput. In the single input single output (SISO) case, CQI is a function of the channel to a
particular user, which (for low Doppler’s shift) does not fluctuate much between adjacent
frames. But in case of MU-MIMO, in addition to being a function of the channel to the user,
CQI is also a function of the precoder used at the BS. Hence, better the precoding is lesser is the
interference and higher CQI will be.

3.2.5 Scheduling

When we have a number of users contending for same resource, throughputs can be
increased by scheduling those users who experience a good channel. This increase in system
performance merely because of scheduling the best-set of users at any point of time is known as
multi-user diversity. However, maximizing system throughput must not come as a result of
cell-edge users (who face poor channel conditions) never being scheduled. System performance
must be maximized and at the same time a certain amount of fairness must be ensured among
the users in the system. A multi-user scheduler that meets these demands needs to be
implemented.
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3.3 Precoding techniques of MU-MIMO

3.3.1 Zero Forcing Beamforming (ZFBF) and Unitary precoding

ZFBF and unitary precoding are two useful precoding techniques for MU-MIMO in
limited feedback environments. ZF precoding is a potential precoder design for MU-MIMO.
The main benefit of ZF scheme is that the interference is pre-cancelled at the transmitter side. It
implies that eNodeB has most of the computational complexity in designing the precoder and each
terminal needs only information regarding its own data streams for reception. However the
quantized channel information has to be precise, so that the multi-user interference becomes
sufficiently low in order to get gains from this scheme. The ZF precoder can be designed using
the moore-penrose psuedo inverse as given below (assuming “u” users are paired together)

 
WT   eq ( eq  eq )
(3.2)

where  eq is the equivalent channel feedback and WT is the precoder used.

3.3.2 Channel Inversion Method and Diagnolization method (BD)

Channel inversion method is one of the linear precoding MU-MIMO techniques

which is simple and has capacity limit. When spatial correlation is increased, the multi-user
channel capacity decreases rapidly. BD can perfectly cancel co-channel interference (CCI), but
has antenna constraint at the BS and MS. The computation burden for system is very heavy
when the number of users is very large. Both channel inversion method and BD are based on the
feedback of the MIMO channel matrix, so the feedback is very large. More information about
these techniques can be found in [13][14][15].
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3.4 System Model

Let us consider a MIMO system with M transmitting antennas at the BS and N

receiving antennas at each MS as shown in figure 3.1. There is a codebook known a prior to
both the BS and all MSs. If U users are waiting to be scheduled at the BS, the scheduler will
determine K (<U) users according to scheduling algorithm and the feedback sent by the MSs. At
the same time, the scheduler will select a precoding matrix W from the codebook to precode for
the scheduled K users before transmission [3].


x1
User 1

User 1 data x1 1

User 2 data x2 2 x2
SCHEDULER PRECODER
. . . User 2

User U data xk M
. .
. .

xk
User K

Feedback: CQI, Precoder Vector index.

Figure 3.1: MU-MIMO System setup.

The OFDM technique has become one of the most promising techniques for next generation
wireless communication systems. Since OFDM technique can deal frequency selective fading as
flat fading, so in this thesis, we model the MIMO channel as the flat fading MIMO channel [3].
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3.4.1 Uncorrelated Channel Model

The received signal vector at the k th MS is given by

yk =Hk Wx+n k k = 1,2,.....,U (3.3)

where
 x1   h k11 h k12  h k 1M 
x   k 
 h 21 h k 22  hk 2M 
x   2  and Hk   
    
   k 
h h k NM  NXM
 N1 h N 2 
k
 xk  KX 1

• xk is the complex symbol transmitted for k th user.

• Hk ∈ CN ×M is the N×M wireless channel matrix from the k th MS to BS and hij ∼CN (0,
1) which represents the channel impulse response coupling the j th antenna at the BS to the ith
antenna at the MS and its amplitude obeys independent and identical Rayleigh-distribution.
• W=  v1 v2 . . . vk Ml K W∈C is a precoder chosen from the codebook C which contains set of

unitary precoders and vk represents precoding vector used to precode k th user data, where k is
called stream indicator or precoding vector index.

• nk ∼ CN (0, No IN ) is noise vector at the k th MS.

3.4.2 Correlated Channel model

The antennas at the BS are magnitude correlated i.e., each antenna at the BS sees same
channel gain to all receiver antennas of k th user. Now the channel in the previous subsection can
be modified as

 h1 (e j k e j 2 k e j 3 k e j 4 k ) 
Hk   j k j 2 k j 3 k j 4 k 
 h2 (e e e e )  (3.4)
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Here θk∼ u [−π/3, +π/3] for k th user, hi is Rayleigh distributed random variable representing

the channel gain between ith receive antenna and any of the antennas at BS.

3.5 Proportional Fair (PF) Scheduler

The PF scheduler is designed to take advantage of multi-user diversity while

maintaining comparable long-term throughput for all users. Let Rk (t) denote the instantaneous
data rate that user k can achieve at time t, and let Tk (t) be the average throughput for user k

up to time slot t. The PF scheduler selects the user denoted as k ∗ with the highest Rk (t)/Tk
(t) for transmission. In the long term, this is equivalent to selecting the user with the highest
instantaneous rate relative to its average throughput.
The average throughput Tk (t) for all users is then updated according to

1 1
Tk (t  1)  (1  )Tk (t )  Rk (t ) k=k *
tc tc
1
= (1  )Tk (t ) k  k*
tc

Rk (t )
PF Metric =
Tk (t )
(3.5)
Thus consistently underserved users receive scheduling priority, which promotes fairness.
The parameter tc controls the latency of the system. If tc is large, the latency increases, with the
benefit of higher sum throughput. If tc is small, the latency decreases, since the average
throughput values change more quickly, at the expense of some throughput.

There are other schedulers like Round Robin scheduler (RR scheduler) which schedules
users one after another without any priority and greedy scheduler, which schedule the users
based on their instantaneous rates by ignoring the average throughput and sacrificing the
fairness.
25 | P a g e

CHAPTER 4

4. Mathematical Procedure

In this chapter we introduce formulation used to calculate CQI and capacity of users.

4.1 MU-MIMO Capacity Formulation

Referring to the system model in figure 3.1 the received signal vector for 1st user can be
expressed as

y1  H1Wx  n1
(4.1)

Now the transmitted symbol for the 1st user xi is to be estimated from this received vector.
For traditional MIMO detection a linear receiver is used to detect the transmit data. ZF,
MMSE and MRC detection criterions are commonly employed. In order to obtain good
performance, we consider a linear MMSE receiver equation discussed earlier and can be re-
written as

 x1 
x 
y1  H1  v1v2  vk   2   n1
 
 
 xk 
K
y1  H1v1 x1   H v x n
i 1,i 1
1 i i 1 (4.2)

The first term represents the desired signal, the second term is inter stream interference
caused by scheduling more than one user and the third term is complex Additive White Gaussian
Noise (AWGN) at the receiver. Let the effective channel after precoding be expressed as

H̃1 = H1 W, where H̃1 is N × K precoded channel matrix.

26 | P a g e

4.1.1 MMSE Receiver

MMSE receiver will try to reduce the MSE between the desired and estimated symbols. The
linear 1 × N MMSE receiver b1 to decode 1st user data can be expressed as
 1
b1  min {|x1  x1 |2 }  min {|x1  y1 |2 }  p*R
b b (4.3)

where

• R is N × N auto-correlation matrix of received vector y1 .

• p is N × 1 cross-correlation vector between the desired symbol x1 and received

vector y1 .

Assuming noise and data are i.i.d and uncorrelated random vectors. The total power constraint P
is divided equally among K users, expressions for R and p is calculated as follows

R  { y1 y1*}

 
 1 { XX *} 1*  {n1n1*}

 P   *
=   1 1  N 0 I N
K (4.4)

p  { y1 x1*}

 1v1{x1 x1*}

P
=   1 v1
K

P
=   h1
K (4.5)
27 | P a g e

where h̃ 1 = H1 v1 = [H̃ 1 ]1 = [H1 W]1 and “ ∗ ” indicates conjugate transpose operation. The
final expression for MMSE filter is written as

1
  
 
KN 0 
b1  h 1 1* 
*
IN
 
1
P
  (4.6)

From the matrix inversion term, it is evident that MMSE receiver will try to reduce inter stream
interference but cannot remove it completely. Here the criterion is not to make the inter stream
interference zero but to minimize the MSE.

4.1.2 CQI Calculation

Let us calculate the C QI of the 1st user. The estimated symbol at the k th MS can be written as

 K
x1  b1 y1  b1H1v1 x1   b H v x bn
i 1,i 1
1 1 i i 1 1
(4.7)

where bl is MMSE receiver vector. Assuming the total power P is divided equally among K
users, expressions for signal (S), interference (I), and noise powers (N) of 1st user is calculated as
follows

S  {(b1H1v1 x1 )(b1H1v1 x1 )*}

=|b1H1v1 |2 E{x1 x1*}

P
=  |b1 H1v1 |2
K (4.8)
K
I  {(b H v x )(b H v x ) }
i 1,i 1
1 1 i i 1 1 i i
*

K
= E{x1 x1*}  |b1 H1vi |2
i 1,i 1

P K
=    |b1 H1vi |2
 K  i 1,i 1 (4.9)
28 | P a g e

N = E{(b1n1 )(b1n1 )* }

= b1 E{b1n1*}b1*
 b1 2 N 0 (4.10)

S
CQI1 
I+N

P
 |b1 H1v1 |
2

 K
P K
   |b1 H1vi |   b1  N 0
2 2

  i 1,i 1
K (4.11)

Here “  .  ”indicates norm of the vector. Since noise is assumed to be Gaussian distributed,
Capacity of 1st user C1 can be calculated from Shannon’s channel capacity theorem as

C1 = log2 (1 + C QI1)
(4.12)
After calculating all individual capacities, the sum capacity can be calculated by adding
individual capacities.
.

K
Csum   Ci
i 1 (4.13)
29 | P a g e

4.2 Procedure
This section explains how abstraction is performed at the BS and MS.

1. In case of MU-MIMO each user has to feedback the following information to the BS.
(a) CQI for all the subbands.

(b) Stream Indicator or Precoding vector index for all the subbands.

The above information can be calculated based on the desired and interfering channels to
each user. Note that the feedback sent by the MS during frame number (n) is used to schedule
users in frame number (n+1). Hence the feedback path is indicated as frame (n+1).

2. Now it is the job of PF Scheduler to select which set of K users need to be scheduled out of U
users in a particular subband based on the above feedback.
(a) First the PF Scheduler will calculate the PF metrics for all users.

(b) It will try to find set of K users who prefer different stream indicators.

(c) If there are more than one set of users then it will select those set of users who has

maximum sum PF metric.

(d) If there is no such set of users then scheduler will randomly force the users to use
different stream indicator so that pairing can be done.

3. After scheduling a dataregion the average throughput of all the users are updated. Then the
scheduler will schedule the users for next dataregion. This way scheduler will schedule users
to all dataregions one by one. When there are large numbers of users contending for service then
pairing is not a problem, since there is very high probability that at least K users will choose
different stream indicators.
4. After scheduling, the SINR is calculated at the MS.

5. The SINR calculated in the previous step is used to calculate performance metrics like sum
capacity and throughput.
30 | P a g e

BS MS

frame (n) frame (n) Desired and

Scheduler CQI and precoding interfering channel
vector calculation information

frame (n+1) frame(n)

Feedback from
MS: frame (n+1) SINR
1) CQI calculation
2) PVI

Performance
Metrics: frame (n)
1) sum capacity
2) Throughput

Figure 4.1 Procedure for MU-MIMO.

31 | P a g e

CHAPTER 5

5. Results and Discussion

5.1 Matlab Simulation Results

In this section we will discuss how the capacity will effect when multiple users are
paired in a dataregion. Here in total we have 12 subbands and 20 users competing for
resources.

System Parameters
Parameters Values

No. of antennas at BS station 2/4

No. of antennas at MS station 2/4

Frames transmitted 100

Channel uncorrelated/correlated

Subbands 12

Iterations 100

SNR (dB) 0:1:50

Users contending for resource 20

Users served [234]

Channel repetition across 1

subbands
32 | P a g e

Figure 5.1 represents the sum capacity of MU-MIMO for 4 ×2 wi t h u ncorrel at ed

channel . In this figure we clearly observe that the sum capacity of 2 users is higher when
compared to 3 users and 4 users. It is well understood that as the number of users increases, the
inter stream interference will increase hence the CQI of each user will decrease and also the
capacity per user decreases. Since the number of antennas at the mobile station are only two, the
receiver can suppress only one interferer effectively resulting in higher sum capacity in case of 2
users when compare to sum capacity of 3 users and 4.

Figure 5.2 represents the sum capacity of MU-MIMO for 4×1 with uncorrelated
channel. In this figure, we can clearly notice that the sum capacity of 2 users is higher when
compared to that of 3 and 4 users. The main difference between the two graphs is that, in figure
5.1 the sum capacity for 2 users increases linearly, where as in case of figure 5.2 the sum
capacity increases exponentially.

Figure 5.3 and figure 5.4 represents the sum capacity of MU-MIMO for 4×2 and 4×1
with correlated channel. Here also, as the number of users increases the sum capacity decreases.
In the case of single receiving antenna (i.e. M=1) the sum capacity of users is smaller when
compared to that of two receiving antenna at the MS. For both correlated and uncorrelated cases,
as the number of users increases, the sum capacity decreases.
33 | P a g e

SUM CAPACITY of MU-MIMO for 4Tx X 2Rx,UnCorrelated channel

35

SUM CAPACITY per subband in symbols/sec/Hz

2-Users
3-Users
30
4-Users

25

20

15

10

0
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50
SNR in dB

Figure 5.1Sum capacity of MU-MIMO for 4×2 with uncorrelated channel

SUM CAPACITY of MU-MIMO for 4Tx X 1Rx,UnCorrelated Channel

SUM CAPACITY per subband in symbols/sec/Hz

12
2-Users
3-Users
10 4-Users

2
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50
SNR in dB

Figure 5.2 Sum capacity of MU-MIMO for 4×1 with uncorrelated channel
34 | P a g e

SUM CAPACITY of MU-MIMO for 4Tx X 2Rx,Correlated channel

SUM CAPACITY per subband in symbols/sec/Hz

35
2-Users
30 3-Users
4-Users
25

20

15

10

0
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50
SNR in dB

Figure 5.3 Sum capacity of MU-MIMO for 4×2 with correlated channel

SUM CAPACITY of MU-MIMO for 4Tx X 1Rx,Correlated channel

SUM CAPACITY per subband in symbols/sec/Hz

12
2-Users
3-Users
10 4-Users

2
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50
SNR in dB

Figure 5.4 Sum capacity of MU-MIMO for 4×2 with correlated channel
35 | P a g e

From figures 5.1 to 5.4, we can clearly observe that

 As the number of users increases the sum capacity decreases.

 The optimum number of users that can be scheduled in a dataregion to achieve
maximum throughput is equal to minimum of the number of antennas at the BS and MS.
 The sum capacity increases linearly with SN R (dB) when number of users paired is
not greater than minimum of the number of antennas at the BS and MS i.e., when
K  min {M, N} then sum capacity increases linearly, otherwise it saturates at some
point.
36 | P a g e

CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSIONS

MU-MIMO is a promising technique which allows more than one user that can be served
in each subband. An efficient multi-user proportional fair (PF) scheduler algorithm is designed
and implemented in MU-MIMO technique with code book based precoding that has been
proposed for the IEEE 802.16m mobile broadband standard. Optimum number of users can be
scheduled in a dataregion to achieve maximum sum capacity, which is equal to minimum
number of antennas at the base station and the mobile station. The sum capacity increases
linearly with SNR (db) when the number of users paired is not greater than the minimum of the
number of antennas at the BS and MS i.e. when K  min {M, N} then sum capacity increases
linearly, otherwise it saturates at some other point. From the results discussed in the previous
chapter, multiple users can be paired in a dataregion resulting in higher sum capacity. In
addition, we observe that as the number of user’s increases, the sum capacity decreases.
37 | P a g e

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